CodePlex have been having problems for more than a week now, so we haven’t been able to make new releases or use the source control. This has crippled our collaboration within the BlogEngine.NET team, but far from stopped the progress. Here’s a quick update of what have been done since CodePlex went offline.

MetaWeblog API

The MetaWeblog API has been implemented, so it now is possible to use Windows Live Writer, Word 2007 or other blogging tools that supports the API. It also enables cross-posting from other platforms such as Digg.

RSS

The RSS support is being greatly improved and will now feature RSS 2.0, ATOM 1.0 and OPML 1.0. It will also provide the ability for users to create rich blog posts that support the most common syndication extensions. Podcasting will also be supported along with other media extensions.

Trackbacks and pingbacks

The ability to send and receive track- and pingbacks has been much improved. Whenever a track-/pingback is received it is added as a comment and a screenshot of the sender website is shown instead of the Gravatar. It will be spam filtered using Akismet or some other mechanism.

New widgets

A lot of new widgets have been added to be used in the themes including a tag cloud, calendar, month archive list and recent post view. All the controls can be configured in many ways to allow theme designers the flexibility they need.

AJAX

The calendar widget is now AJAX enabled for a smoother flipping between months. Also the comments have been AJAX enabled so no postback is needed. If the browser doesn’t support AJAX, the commenting fall back on regular postback behaviour and the invisible CAPTCHA enabled.

Improved theme control

It is now possible to apply theming to almost every element on the blog. A theme designer has total control over the master page which contains everything the designer want’s to add including custom user controls etc. A post is also totally customizable including the comments. No special macro language is used - it is all native ASP.NET for total flexibility and control.

Comments

The comments have also been improved so they now contain the comment author’s national flag. It can be turned on and off in the admin settings page and customized by the theme. The live preview now auto-resolves typed URL’s for a more accurate preview.

Categories

A category admin settings page has been added to enable deletion and renaming of all categories. You still add new categories when you create a new post.

Referrer stats

I’ve always spent too much time in my old dasBlog referrer page. I loved it. That way it was easy to check who was linking to the blog and pay them a visit. Now BlogEngine.NET has a similar feature.

BlogML

In the very near future we want to add support for BlogML - both for import and export. It's an important feature because it allows you to move the content of an entire blog to and from BlogEngine.NET. It's a simple but very powerful feature.

Bug fixes

Other than adding new features, we have fixed a lot of bugs and made existing features better. The result is a much more stabile and full featured engine.

All in all, it is becomming a stabile blog engine with a lot of exclusive features.

In the late nineties background music and click sounds on websites were quite popular. Today, we don’t use those sounds anymore on most commercial websites. Only flash sites make use of click sounds and background music to set the mood. Generally I think it is a good idea to backup your message with sounds or audio clips whenever it is appropriate. So when is it appropriate?

It is a tricky question because there are not many sites that use audio to support its message, so who knows what works or not when we can’t see it in action. I don’t think click sounds can be used to support a message, it’s just annoying. But voice bits could be cool to implement various places on a website or blog.

Take this blog for instance. I could add a little speaker icon next to my image on the right side of this page that when clicked, played an audio file of me presenting the website shortly. Also, when a visitor writes a comment, I could record a thank you message that would be played back to the visitor. Once a week I could change the audio message to add some variety.

Just think about it for a second. You probably recognize the voices of Scott Hanselman, Rory Blyth, Carl Franklin, Scott Guthrie and many more that either has their own audio or video show about .NET or has been guests on them many times. I do. It’s almost like you know these guys even though you’ve never met them in person. I believe that the audio has played a major role in that, so why not start using audio yourself?

It will be part of the branding of your blog or personal site because it let’s your visitors get closer to you as a human being instead of just being another anonymous site owner. Your visitors might just feel they know you a little and that hopefully makes them return to your site more than they normally would. Visitors are good, returning visitors are even better.

The only drawback to embedding audio on a website as I see it is when you forget to turn your speakers down at work and they suddenly make all your co-workers aware that your favourite porn star appreciate your comment on her blog in a highly inappropriate way. Other than that, I only see benefits.