A friend and colleague of mine recommended this article and it really is very good reading…
How C.R.A.P is Your Site Design?

I certainly will be re-reading it and seeing if I can improve my site with the points Mike Rundle makes.

A new build is available that adds a couple of minor features and fixes:

• Added ability to specify connection and transfer timeouts for GetWebFile object
• Added ability for GetWebFile to follow page redirects automatically and also to handle cookies so that the request will work as expected
• Added new recursive file management abilities, this enables you to copy or move an entire folder structure to a different location (really useful)
• Added FileManagement option to “error” if specified file to copy/move/delete doesnt exist (not available if recursive option is selected)
• Added ability to define and pass in macros to a command line build file: -m==
  For example, you could specify several macros to the one file being executed like this:
  -m=”SOURCE=c:\my test folder\” -m=”DEST=c:\my dest folder\”
• Fixed bug where running an external BuildIT file as a task would only execute the first task
• Fixed bug where macros in GetWebFile werent being expanded

I have been doing a bit of tweaking to BuildIT recently.

One of these things is the ability to specify some timeout values to the Get Web Page task … this allows you to fine tune your tasks so it doesn’t hold up your process, or if it’s a slow server, you can allow it to wait.

The other changes are more internal:

• Follow Redirects: Now the task will follow any redirects (to a maximum of 20) so you can through login pages or other redirected pages.
• Cookie Handling: It also internally handles cookies, so if you passed login information in the URL or Post Data which subsequently set session or permanent cookies for logging-in, then the cookies are used on other pages or any redirects.

These additions should make the Task a lot more useful.

I have installed an interesting application - BlogJet. It’s a cool Windows client for my blog tool (as well as for other tools). Get your copy here: http://blogjet.com

“Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination.” — Albert Einstein

I have been using an old ASP based blog engine called BlogWorksXML … this was in alpha years ago and the author has ceased any and all development, which is a real shame.

I had been suffering from an unmangeable deluge of comment spam for porn and all sorts … this was a real pain to manage due to the way blogworks works and with no improvements on the horizon it was time to pull it all or look for an alternative.

So, I had to look for something that would have the following things; installable on my own server rather than linking off to a different site; e-mail notifications when someone posted a comment, so I know about it and can reply … a few times, some comments had been sitting there for a day or two before I knew about them; multiple trackbacks; moderation/approval of comments and other ways to control spam; I quite like the ability to power it from a GUI like BlogJet so something popular and well know was essential

Now a quick search on google found no decent and still supported (also English written in case I have to get into the code) blog engines using just plain vanilla ASP so I started looking further afield.

My investigations ended with Moveable Type (which although powerful, costs money for anything other than a personal blog which I fear this is not, so that was out), and WordPress … Wow!

Getting the server to a point that I could install WordPress … php and mysql, and together oh what a pain .. install this, unzip that, read google to find out why I am getting errors, setup test pages, configure an ini file, discover that the ini file it actually uses is in c:\windows, try again, modify, test, success! Hurrah!

I then spent a little while, creating my own template/theme so it looks like my current blog and voila, its all cool. And more importantly, its continually supported so I should get any new things that get added.

So, when everything has been fully tested, I will start installing it onto the live server and hopefully do some more blogging again.

Thanks go to Timothy Trimble and his review of BuildIT:
The ART of Software Development Awards - BuildIT

Its soo nice to get feedback, I do like to read user comments so please continue and I will do my best to keep up with requests in making BuildIT the product for you!

I would like to comment on some of Tim’s points…

• Copying and Moving whole folders recursively is a very good point, I will add that in next.

 

• Yes, help and documentation is severly lacking … I really must get my act together and do this, without it people are missing some of the really useful ‘hidden’ features like special macros that can be used in all tasks:
  $YYYY$ = replace with 4 digit year
  $MM$ = replace with 2 digit month
  $DD$ = replace with 2 digit day
  etc.   

  A full list of the macros supported can be found from the Help menu in BuildIT.

  Also, unlike other tools, BuildIT comes with a command line version “buildit.com” as standard. You can even use the “Schedule Run” command (Run menu) to auto-generate a task in Windows Task Scheduler with the appropriate options for running your build file using the command line tool.

I have now added a “Get Web File” task:

This allows you to download a file from a web site, or save the contents of a page or head request.

This was easily done using script, but a few people asked for a specific task as they didnt know how to program script … I guess the user base of BuildIT is expanding to non-programmers which is great, as it really is a useful tool for anyone and everyone, anyhow I will probably look to include more tasks that were easy to do in script but should have a GUI for instead.

I have added to the GUI interface, the ability to specify a Proxy Server, a port number and the Passive Mode to an FTP Task.

The script object already had an FTPConnect method with these options but you could not set them on the GUI. This has now been changed.

As requested, I have now made BuildIT look more Windows XP with shadowed menus:

… and even customisable Toolbars:

At the moment, I am working on making the interface more ‘XP’ style and not the clunky Win95 look. This involves working on Toolbars and Menus. I am almost done, and when its tested I will post a new release.

In the meantime, I have been toying with a new idea and need feedback…

Should I make BuildIT MDI and have a workspace ability? The Workspace, I think, would be quite cool because you could add all your buildit project files to a workspace manager view on the left and group buildit files into folders and sub-folders. From this view you can double-click to edit a specific BuildIT project.

In my view, its quite nice to be able to ‘manage’ your projects like that but it doesnt have much use otherwise. I quite like the SDI multi-instance BuildIT, its so much easier and you can see many on-screen at the same time.

So, feedback would be cool, e-mail me.