Update: please see my dasBlog retraction

I’m getting increasingly frustrated with this POS blogging software called dasBlog.  I originally moved from my own software to dasBlog because it had more features.  I wish before I made the conversion I knew that those features are more like vapor ware.  They don’t work.  I had the “email a post to your weblog” feature working, have made no changes, but now it doesn’t work. Not only that it doesn’t work, but the event logs aren’t even telling me where my emails are going.

The application restarts every five minutes, and there are so many little idiosyncrasies that I can’t control.  For example, I can’t even change the date format at the bottom of my posts. Sometimes buttons just stop working. Email notifications don’t have SMTP authentication!? What SMTP server these days doesn’t require authentication? Making new themes is damn near impossible since it feels like the style and data are not completely separate. And need I mention all these crazy dasBlog style tags I need to figure out? Regarding the issue of styles, haven’t the developers considered using XML and XSLT to format the data?  That would make my life bearable. XSLT is a standard. I’m not a Radio Userland user … what do half of those propritary tags mean to me?

And now my biggest gripe: Documentation. When I first installed the application I wanted to create my own theme.  I was unhappy with the defaults that came with the software, but figured many people out there had made their own and had some good tutorials.  Wow was I wrong. To this day I can’t find anyone that’s not using the default themes or a slightly modified one.  When I went to create my own, the documentation from dasBlog.net was either nonexistent or even worse, incorrect. Then there’s the gotdotnet space. Nothing. SourceForge? Nothing. Oops, forgot I had to check that temporary Wiki too. Nothing.  Maybe I’ll try the developer’s website. Something, but wrong place and not enough. It took me forever to build my “desert” theme and even now it still looks terrible compared to my old website.

Looking around you’d think I’m the only person having these problems.  Or maybe I’m the only person who’s not happy with just using the default out-of-the-box functionality. Ugh.  I should have never made this move. It just feels like an alpha or beta product. Sigh.

My event log just for two hours:

bloody hell. Hanselman wasright when he said “DasBlog, we suck less!” Yes, less than scanning my journal entriesand posting them in .pdf format.