Wow, I didn’t expect such an uproar with my post regarding my dasBlog gripes. Let me just say that although it appeared like a personal attack, it was never meant to be. I had reached my frustration point with mail-to-blog and had been struggling for a while with themes. On top of that it had been a long day at work and I had just received an unwelcome personal email. Suffice to say I was just in a bad mood and took it out on the wrong people. As a developer who works hard on projects, I do appreciate open source. I know how much time and effort it takes to develop software.

The main criticism I received was that I should have asked the developers or turnedto the community. My thinking is that no one wants to hear from some guy who can’tfigure out how to mail-to-weblog. As far as community is concerned, I probably couldhave turned to the sourceforge message board, but admittedly I was just looking tovent. A developer community has always been a mystery to me. I’m just a guy who likesto write code and hang out at the bar. My friends aren’t developers, and I don’t haveany “online friends.” I’ve always been self sufficient when it comes to fixing myown problems.

To address specific comments, Omar said that if I really cared, I would “help insteadof throwing stones.” He’s right; I’ve got no right to criticize open source and someone’shard work.

Keith said “i think you didnt spend enough time to read the documentation… or betteryet looked at the sample themes and analyze it… programmers search google for answers,REAL PROGRAMMERS analyze and makes a solution to the problem before calling 911 togoogle! i think its really lame when you blame the program because you didnt havethe knowledge to make it work! STUDY! geesh!” My contention is that I did read thedocumentation, and I stand by my observation that it’s incomplete. As for REAL PROGRAMMERSwho analyze a problem instead of “calling 911 to google”, I can say from experiencethat pasting an error message into my google toolbar is much more efficient than pokingaround code. 99 times out of 100 someone else out there has had the same problem andalready fixed it. Why waste my time?

Paul said “some of the best blogs I read use dasBlog so the problem must be at projectFrutility.”I agree that there are many many good blogs using dasBlog. And all these blogs areAFAIK using the default themes and options. My issue is with harnessing the powerof dasBlog. I’d be interested to know how the majority of dasBloggers post to theirweblog. I haven’t found a truly convenient solution yet.

Greg said “Look, it’s all open source, so you can change the date/time format as yourheart desires. If you’re a good person, you’ll make it more usable and share everythingyou improve with the rest of the world.” While I’m sure I could easily modify thecode, my concern is that it will all be overwritten in the next release. So that onlyleaves joining the development effort. I realize it’s a commitment that I’m not willingto make right now and have never been involved in an open source project. (plus Iwon’t even go into the melee that ensued when I installed CSV on my box)

So, given that I have any credibility left, here are my calm and collected suggestionsand feature requests.

1) Post date time format. It would be helpful to somehow be able to pass in a formatstring to change the formatting of the datetime.

2) SMTP notifications. My server requires SMTP authentication thus negating the abilityto receive notifications.

3) Documentation. As a newbie to dasBlog, I found it easy to get up and running withbasic functionality, but hard to extend it any further than that. My impression isthat some guys are doing cool things with dasBlog, but these are also the guys whowrote the code and know it inside and out. Scott says “There’s actually pretty gooddocumentation on making themes.” I agree it’s good, but I still found the descriptionsunclear as to their true function. When I was making the theme I ran across undocumentedtags in the sample themes. I can’t name them cause I’ve forgotten what they were,but in retrospect I should have added my comments to the documentation and sent themoff to the developers. I’ve also ran across other cool things like archive lists,but can’t find any documentation on how to do that. Maybe it’s out there, but as anewbie I didn’t find it easily accessible. A central location for all documentationand cool things you can do with dasBlog would be awesome.

4) XSLT. Formatting the XML with XSLT would greatly ease theme development. When makingmy theme I found that I really had no good tool to develop/preview with. I had VisualStudio.NET, Dreamweaver, Frontpage, TopStyle 3 available to me. Ultimately I thinkI did the most development in Notepad.

5) Mail-to-blog. I believe this is hands-down the best feature of dasBlog. I haven’tfound an easier way to quickly post with photos. Unfortunately Outlook either insertsfont tags or puts sytlesheet attributes on the HTML tags. It would be nice if dasBlogcould filter this stuff out.