wave3

I interviewed recently for a really interesting job.  The position is ostensibly called “Web Architect” which doesn’t tell you much until you realise that some of it is about putting web solutions together for a company and specifying the technologies used.  There’s an element of coding too, some administration, some presentation and some marketing.  All in all it struck me as perfect, and I want it.  There might be another interview soon, so we shall see how it pans out.

During the 30 or so minutes I took me to write the previous paragraph I encountered some issues.  Firstly, the latest version of Windows Live Writer comes with an interesting bug in it.  It is a late beta, so that’s pretty much expected.  However, this is one that I have never seen before with this product, and it only happens under a specific set of circumstances.  Your blog must be using the MetaWeblog API as an interface, and you must not have upgraded this version from a previous build.  When you try and detect the blog, it will take you through the entire process before throwing an exception.  I haven’t gone to the trouble of running a trace on the XML conversation, and to be honest I think this error happens in the code after the conversation is complete.  I was talking to Joe Cheng who works on the Live Writer team at Microsoft, and he said they had found the bug and would release a patch soon.  Can’t give you an exact timeframe on that though.  So, if you are thinking of installing the latest build of Live Writer (the “Wave3” betas) and use BlogEngine.Net then make sure that you upgrade rather than fresh installing. 

The second issue was that the ping services tab in BlogEngine.Net was all of a sudden empty of entries.  I don’t know why, but they had all been erased.  While trying to update them, I discovered a problem with the identity field for the table that holds the ping servers – it was setup incorrectly.  I think something happened when I copied the data from my dev to the live server a few weeks back, but because I was only posting from Live Writer I hadn’t noticed it.  At some point I have to draw up a smoke test for BlogEngine.Net that goes through testing for ALL of the functions before rolling out live.  Anyway, in addition to the table issue, I had to go and get a new list of ping servers as I noticed that a few have gone inactive.  One thing that I noticed is that Microsoft still don’t have one for their live search, though they do allow submission of a site map.  However, the transaction causes a nicely handled exception which dumps out the results to a log file.  Anyway, here is the new list of ping servers I have gathered:

http://api.moreover.com/rpc2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rpc2
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/xmlrpc
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/rpc2
http://rpc.pingthesemanticweb.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.twingly.com/
http://rpc.weblogs.com/rpc2
http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx
http://www.bloglines.com/ping