i am a camera

I released Vine Type 2.0 recently and it's running most of my client sites now. Version 2 requires .NET Framework 2.0 so v1.5 will be the last version to support .NET 1.1.

Version 2 brings new features, reworking of some existing features, and new design possibilities. The biggest change is reworking the display of search results.

Search Results

Search results are now more like Google and less like WordPress. Version 1 would just display entire articles or article summaries when keywords matched, but you didn't know which terms matched which search result nor did you know how often a term matched an article or what context the term was mentioned.

I had a lot of fun putting those images together for the Vine Type 1.5 announcement, and I am totally digging having Flickr photos and Ma.gnolia bookmark integration into this site.

If you missed the announcement on the Vine Type or AspAdvice sites, I released Vine Type 1.5 with support for Flickr and Ma.gnolia.

I released Vine Type 1.4 this evening. It adds Gravatar (Globally Recognized Avatar) support and fixes an annoyance when editing entries.

Visit the Vine Type website to download or update your Vine Type site. Here are the Release Notes:

Version 1.4

1. Fixed

   • When adding or updating an article, Vine Type now stays on correct section

2. Added

   • Gravatar Support

3. Upgrade Instructions

   • replace vinetype.dll
   • refresh your browser

Vine Type 1.2 is now available for download.

This point release features support for the Atom syndication standard in a big way.

Four Atom feeds are available:

1. All-Articles

   default.aspx?feed=atom10

2. All-Comments

   default.aspx?feed=atom10wb

3. Single-Article Comments

   default.aspx?feed=atom10wb&id= n

4. Section Articles

   default.aspx?feed=atom10&section= sectionname

MMmmmmm. Crow for breakfast today.

Despite my proclamation last year that the Atom syndication standard was redundant and irrelevant, Vine Type v1.2 will support three distinct Atom feeds.

In the spirit of friendly competition to the other .NET content management systems, I created a screencast showing how fast and easy it is to install Vine Type and launch a Vine Type website.

So today I officially challenge DotNetNuke, DasBlog, and SubText to the .NET CMS installation challenge: Try to beat this -- download to launch in 2:52.

Design a Site. Help a Child.

Hi everyone. This is Carl Camera, maker of Vine Type. I'm very happy to release Vine Type 1.0. What is most exciting for me is that I get to announce that half of proceeds from Vine Type Pro will be given to charities that help the children of Guatemala.

Vine Type is a passion of mine. I'm very happy to provide a content management system built with web standards in mind. As much as I like being a champion of web standards, I'd like even more to be a champion for the children of Guatemala. This tiny country in Central America is still recovering from war and natural disasters. The needs are great and I am looking forward to assisting as I can the children and that nation.

Phạm Đức Hải seems to be testing out Vine Type at his home page ajaxviet.com -- completely in Vietnamese -- except for the occasional "download" or "email."

As a programmer, seeing someone use Vine Type and adjust the interface as you hoped someone would is just...cool.

Although he may eventually opt for another CMS, I'm hopeful that Vine Type will suit his needs. If you are aware of other Vine Type websites in other languages, I would love to hear from you.

I released Vine Type 0.99c last night and is available for download.

Prompted by user suggestions, I've enhanced Vine Type to allow placing all the files within the web space. Vine Type continues to support its original suggested file configuration that places the vinetype.config file outside of the web space.

I released Vine Type 0.99 today. It is available for download from the Vine Type website

Included in this version -- the first to include ViPR -- is a font from Larabie Fonts called Libel Suit.

More details available at the Vine Type website. Feedback is always appreciated.

And if you would indulge me just a bit and allow a little bragging here: I also upgraded this site to version 0.99 just now. That is...

I wonder if there are folks out there that perhaps think the custom font headings on this blog and on Vine Type and Vine Branches are nice, but that's not enough of an incentive to move off of their current content management system. And, as I demonstrated in an earlier post it's possible to stream custom fonts for another site from my server.

While creating ViPR, I became aware that there is a potential for abuse of this technology believe it or not! [Feigned look of horror.] Milan Negovan raised this issue recently.

This week's work was on finalizing the code for Vine Type Inline Png Replacement (ViPR.) ViPR now supports two additional features: alpha transparent text and text rotation. These features will be included in the next release of Vine Type

There's a new feature working its way toward the next release of Vine Type, and it's called ViPR.

ViPR, pronounced "viper," will allow Vine Type designers to specify a font, and several characteristics to use for article titles. ViPR can generate Portable Network Graphics (PNG) images of text on-the-fly, using no hard drive space whatsoever. You'll no longer be limited to standard fonts that are chosen more for their ubiquity than their aesthetics.

My site is serving application/xhtml+xml once again thanks to the fine detective work by Microsoft IIS Tech Support Specialist WenJun.

After over twenty, yes twenty, emails, message board posts, and responses, the problem was determined to be ... my code. I was not handling correctly Request objects that did not contain an AcceptTypes object.

I've added a site map to my blog via the Vine Type $_site_map variable. This is different from the $_nav_map variable in that it lists and links individual articles.

This could still be used for CSS Flyout navigation for a blog site, because blogs tend to have more than one article per section.

For brochure-type sites, however, where there is only one article per section, then the $_nav_map is more applicable.

I've made a minor redesign change to my company site, switching it over from hand-coded ASP to Vine Type. Part of why I didn't do this earlier is that I had flyout navigation in place.

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Now with the release of Vine Type 0.98, I can use the $_nav_map template variable where my navigation goes, then employed nickrigby-style css flyout technique (with some Eric Meyer thrown in ) to create the flyout menu. As I add pages, the flyout expands automatically.

2006 is off to a good start with the release of Vine Type 0.98.

Extended characters are being handled much better now, so I can provide proper diacritical marks to my Spanish greeting above as well as important names such as Tantek Çelik.

I've also added additional comment administrative features and a comment RSS.

For folks who like site maps, I have created two. Both site maps consist of nested unordered lists so that they can be used to create dropdowns or flyouts á là Suckerfish or Nick Rigby.

I think one of the things I want to do before releasing a v1 of Vine Type is to attack the cruft in URLs. Cruft, for Vine Type, are all of the %20s that appear in the address bar when spaces exist in section names.

Advantages of cruft reduction are

• more readable
• easier to type in
• more useable
• friendlier to search engine bots.

Well, three strikes and you're out. The accessibility checker commonly referred to as Cynthia, I discovered, also caused my site to return the beguiling Server Error 500 message.

The Switch to application/xhtml+xml was an interesting experiment but enough is enough. IIS is just not liking some of the browser interactions so until I figure out what is going on with these Server 500 errors, I'm falling back to html/text.

I just released version 0.97 of Vine Type. It fixes the installation problem where the comment form doesn't appear along with a couple usability bugs.

In addition, it adds a couple new features dealing with recent articles. The first is recent articles. This site's homepage now dynamically shows the most recent n (user-customizable in my case 10) articles. I've set a switch in my vinetype.config file to show summaries.

Vine Type, with the tag line Content Management with Standards in Mind was released in Beta to the general public this morning. I've spent a lot of time creating a flexible, customizable, and language-neutral solution -- and it's my hope that it will be well received.

I'm happy to provide an alternative blog/CMS engine to the Microsoft internet server community. Vine Type has been running this site for several months and I've incorporated many popular and useful features. I hope you're able to test it out and provide feedback on it.

In my ongoing saga of switching to application/xhtml+xml MIME type, I've found another victim: Newsgator.

The multitudes of folks checking my site via Newsgator (...whomever that person is; there are a total of two Newsgator subscribers to Iamacamera, and I'm the other...) haven't recieved a site update since I published my Now Serving application/xhtml+xml article.

The W3C validator started showing this error message after I started serving my XHTML 1.1 pages via application/xhtml+xml.

I'm not actually crashing the validator, but for some reason it does not like validating my website now. Apparently, the switch to application/xhtml+xml is causing a much-unwanted side-effect. The CSS "jigsaw" validator doesn't seem to have this same problem.

Note: Code Updated and docmented in the article application/xhtml+xml Part Deux

Iamacamera.org is now serving its valid XHTML 1.1 via the W3C recommended MIME type to those browsers that support it. And it looks like we will all be doing something like this for the next few years at least.

Welcome to the re-launch of my blog now under the power of Vine Type.

I'm interested in seeing if there's any interest in Yet Another Blog Engine, but with it generating XHTML-valid code on a .NET platform, folks might be willing to give it a try. Especially since it's so easy to test out.

I've tried to pack in the most important blog features, but the primary goal during development has always been standard content management functionality. I like the simplicity of the blog paradigm and I think it can be applied to small-to-medium websites.