I ran into a few problems with dasBlog when trying to get it set up.  Even though most of it worked, the HTTP Handlers weren't working.  I kept getting a message that one of the handlers "has a bad module "ManagedPipelineHandler" in its module list".

I moved some things around and tried to change up some things in the config  based upon this article.  That helped get the site up and running, but the handlers still work working.  Googling the error, I found that things could fix using some commands against IIS, but I don't have that ability since this site is hosted.

However, the good folks at DiscountASP did have an option that worked for me.  I could change the application pool from integrated mode to "Classic Mode" and everything worked smoothly.

Moral of the story, if you're trying to run dasBlog on IIS 7, try to do it in classic mode until the team makes the changes to run it under IIS 7.

Now to do some hunting for some different themes. I found a good article on creating your own dasBlog themes, so I may try to get to that eventually.

On an unrelated note, does it seem like Twitter is working as it should lately? The last few times that I've been on there it's been pretty good.  I don't want to jinx things but....

So I'm busy these days and I've quite frankly just not had any time to work on the blog project that I've been plotting for a long time.  Rather than just simply abandon my site (as I have been), I've decided to go with a 3rd party solution - dasBlog. While I'm not particularly in love with any of the native themes that I've seen so far (to be fair, I haven't seen them all and I could just make my own one...), it's been a pretty impressive experience setting this up. All I had to do was change a few config settings, upload the files and go.  I had one issue with an incompatibility with the web.config settings and IIS 7, but that was easily fixed with the information I found here.  I'm looking forward to poking around under to hood to steal get some ideas for my project.

I've put a hold on Tremolo, the ASP.NET MVC site engine for musicians that I was working on, for a few reasons.  The number one is just time. My dance card has been pretty full.  The other reason is that I want to do it right. I got a really good start on it and have solidified how I want to build it, but it wasn't coming out the way I want.  I really want to write really good tests (with MbUnit and RhinoMocks) for the project and have it structured so that it's easy to customize and extend.  Given that it's going to be open source, I know it doesn't have to be perfect out of the gate but I wnat to build a better foundation than what I started with.

Even though I'm a little bummed about having to delay working on Tremolo, I've been really busy in a good way.  I've been playing a lot of music and working on new material.  I've got 3 or 4 songs in the works that are pretty close to being done - a couple of them are older ones that I'm reworking.

Also, Red Earth is playing at McGuffy's on Saturday. We start at 9:30 or so. I'm not sure who we're opening for.