I just posted a new theme over at the BlogEngine.net Gallery called Jacob's Ladder. Go take a look and let me know what you think. It works best on current browsers like Internet Explorer 9, FireFox, Chrome, and Opera.

You can see a working demo by clicking here.

It was recently brought to my attention that there is an issue with the FaceBook Like Extension that I have available for BlogEngine. Some users have reported that after they download and install the extension they get an error that says "Country[Not specified]" when posting to FaceBook. With the help of markm75 and anil21_22gupta and whoever set up the Demo site we used for troubleshooting (THANKS AGAIN!!!) we were able to determine a few things that may help you troublshoot if you ever run across this issue.

The issue happens because of a couple of things, but primarily it revolves around the Country Chooser option in your Comments Settings. If it is enabled and you do not put any text in the Excerpt field when making a post (which becomes the post's <description> tag) then FaceBook cannot determine what the "Country[Not specified]" entry is when parsing the HTML from the rendered page because by default the parser is looking for that <description> tag. If it cannot find it, the parser then parses from the body of the post and can't determine what the heck "Country[Not specified]" is.

There's two work arounds that I know of. One, the simplest, disable the Country Chooser in your Comments Settings. Or two, always make sure you put in text in the Experpt field to create the <description> tag. The reason I say one is the simplest is because I rarely use the Excerpt field and might forget to put text in it because I don't use the Country Chooser option. It's just not important to me, although it may be to others and that's why I'm offering the work arounds.

The BlogEngineWall team is displaying my theme in one of their posts! Well, sort of.  Go take a look in the last picture of their post!

BlogEngine 2.5 has been released! Cool new multiblog feature, Razor Themes and Pages, and a host of other cool new features! And there's a cool new theme bundled with it that I created and contributed called Titanium X which is the theme you're viewing now! Go check it out!

Great work guys!!! It's so much fun working on BE!!! I've learned alot from just tinkering with it and I can't wait to learn more!

The other day I was looking around the new BlogEngine.net Gallery and stumbled across a nifty little extension that adds a FaceBook “Like” button to all posts and posts’ pages. This type of extension has been a much sought after request in the BE community for a while so I had to take a look and see how it works.

Wow! I was totally impressed because this little extension does exactly what I wanted it to do, plus it has the added feature of adding a Tweet button as well!!! Easy to implement and works like a champ!

Being that the code is open source and the author said that “any changes accepted” I wanted to make some layout changes to the extension because I wasn’t happy with having to modify the CSS file(s) of BE. Yes, I could have just added the author’s code to the Global.css file as he suggests for installation but that would mean that every time I updated BE I would have to manually update that CSS file. Or I could have just added it to my theme’s CSS file, but not only would I have the same problem, but I have multiple themes and I didn’t want to update them all. Plus, I think my modifications make installation easier by just dropping the extension into the extensions folder.

The extension has three options for displaying your Like Button but because the author’s code was limiting what was being viewed I added an option to adjust the height of the extension. I also changed the alignment of the Tweet and Facebook buttons (they’re side-by-side) because they weren’t aligning properly for me (the Tweet button was lower than the Facebook button). I also left the author's credits intact in the extension because he did all of the hard work and he deserves the credit! Great job Gayan!

To install the extension place it in your App_Code\Extensions folder.

FacebookLike.zip (2.01 kb)

****UPDATE**** There's an issue that you should be aware of with how FaceBook parses information from posts. Read here for more details.

I was tinkering around with a theme for BlogEngine and ported over the theme you're now seeing. It's a theme I created for a Simple Machines Forum and I've always liked it but the forum isn't used much and I thought that this blog could use a facelift anyway. So here it is! What do you think?

With the popularity of Facebook reaching new heights everyday, I thought that it would be cool to have a “Share to Facebook” link at the bottom of all of my posts so if anyone ever wanted to share anything they could. I searched on the DotNetBlogEngine discussion boards and couldn’t find much to help me. However, there was one post that pointed me in the right direction, and now I’ve figured out how to add the link to all of my posts! Here’s all you have to do:

In your current theme folder, open the PostView.ascx file, and place the following code into <div class="bookmarks"> section:

<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=<%=Server.UrlEncode(Post.AbsoluteLink.ToString()) %>" target="blank"><img src="<%=VirtualPathUtility.ToAbsolute("~/pics/")%>f_logo.png" alt="Share on Facebook" style="margin-right:3px" />Share on Facebook</a>

If you want to use a logo, just make sure it's named f_logo.png and you place it in your PICS folder. If you do not want to use a logo, remove the <img src="<%=VirtualPathUtility.ToAbsolute("~/pics/")%>f_logo.png" alt="Share on Facebook" style="margin-right:3px" /> line from the above text.

Save the file on your server or hosted platform and then go to your blog’s homepage. Now you will see the link at the bottom of posts that links individual posts to Facebook!

The latest release of BlogEngine.net  was officially released yesterday after spending a week or so in Release Candidate state and it’s version 1.5. There’s a couple of great new items like nested comments, improved Metaweblog API which works great with Windows Live Writer as well as some performance tune-ups. Is it worth upgrading from 1.4.5? You bet! You should do it now as a matter of fact!

However, the official release (build 1.5.07), even after spending time as a RC, had a few minor problems, none of which are deal breakers in my opinion. More...

I’ve been looking for a way to display a gallery or slideshow of images that I’ve taken over the years here on my site and unfortunately BlogEngine.net doesn’t have one built in (yet). I started doing some research and found a really cool slideshow created by Vertigo and powered by Microsoft Silverlight, but getting it to work with BlogEngine.net seemed a little over my head as far as programming in .NET is concerned. Fortunately, Bill Beckelman created an extension for BlogEngine.net that allows you to publish the slideshow in a post, and someone posted on Bill’s blog on how the code could be modified so that the extension would work on a page instead of a post.

So that’s how my Slideshow came about. It’s just some pictures of my brother’s wedding and two trips to Bristol Motor Speedway for the NASCAR races. I’ll be adding more albums to it in the future as I figure out which pictures I want to post. The link is on the right under the Pages section, or you can just click here.

Thanks for taking a look!

As if BlogEngine.net wasn’t easy enough to use, I happened to stumble across a nifty little application that has a pretty good following in the blogging community called Windows Live Writer. Yes, I admit to being still “wet behind the ears” when it comes to blogging so excuse my excitement, but with this application I no longer need to log in to my blog and create a post. More...