rene.kabis.org

Little Green Delusions - Browsing Release

1. We’re off to see the wizard…

   It seems that I have managed to make most of AtomSite function on my server by now. It has been a frustrating adventure, full of cranial depilation and temple-to-masonry impacts.

   The trick is to NOT use the binary. There is a cruftload of material missing from it, not least the Javascript used to make much of the basic functionality possible. Try deleting a post when using the binary version -- you won't get far.

   When I went to use the Source, I ran into another problem. Good luck getting it to work with Visual Studio 2005. I also struck out with Visual Web Developer Express 2008. When I finally installed VS2008, I ran smack into a massive problem: while the main AtomSite solution would open, the WebCore project would not -- and it is the linchpin of the entire source!

   When loading up the entire app (for the first time, unmodified), I always got the following problem:

   The project file "C:/ … /WebCore.csproj" cannot be opened. The project type is not supported by this installation.
   

   I "solved" it (quotes intentional) by editing the WebCore.csproj file and removing these two entries:

   {D0B348D5-387D-46EF-BD9A-DC3C25DD68B9}
   
   {603c0e0b-db56-11dc-be95-000d561079b0};{349c5851-65df-11da-9384-00065b846f21};{fae04ec0-301f-11d3-bf4b-00c04f79efbc}
   

   However, once I did this I was unable to "Publish" this site either through a right-click on the WebCore project, or via the Build drop-down menu. Unfortunately, this site must be created using the Publish functionality -- it won't be usable any other way.

   Once I wiped my original Source copy and extracted a new one, I replaced the second line above with the following:

   {349c5851-65df-11da-9384-00065b846f21};{fae04ec0-301f-11d3-bf4b-00c04f79efbc}
   

   Once I did this, not only was WebCore able to load with the rest of the AtomSite solution, but I was also able to publish via a right-click on the WebCore solution.

   Now, of course, I am running into another problem. It seems that most of the project's contributors are from the States. While this is normally not the problem, it is a very big problem when it comes to dates. It appears that many of the date functions within the site make use of highly regional-specific U.S. date formats - specifically the MM-DD-YYY format. Unfortunately, my server makes use of the international ISO 8601 date standard, which uses YYYY-MM-DD. This causes any post submission to crash the site unless I manually edit the publish date to conform to the ISO 8601 standard.

   Will I fix this now? Hell no. It's 0110hrs, and I need my beauty sleep. Cheers.

   Posted by rekabis on July 15 at 12:10 AM

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2. The first post…

   Right now, I have installed AtomSite v1.1 in order to test its capabilities. So far, I am impressed with their ambitions, but disappointed in their progress. Much of the backend (the "dashboard") remains unusable, and requires manual editing of XML files. In fact, even the 'delete' buttons (in the blog area, for example) appear to not work, despite the install-checks (which include checking if a file can be deleted) coming back as all passed.

   Plus, I seem to have to write out my posts in raw HTML. This is NOT user-friendly. I am surprised that a lot of things (slug creation, textarea formatters such as TinyMCE) aren't even automatically included in the default install.

   I'm going to play around with this, and see if I can't fix some of the more glaring and simple problems. Please forgive me if this site remains butt ugly in the near future.

   Posted by rekabis on February 07 at 1:44 PM

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