You may have noticed that strangelights.com has a nice you look and feel. This was prompted by a major overhaul of the software I’m running. I upgraded from .text blogging software to subtext. While the difference between the two isn’t huge but I’m really pleased with the upgrade because they seem to have fixed virtually everything I didn’t like about .text. Also .text took nearly the whole day to setup and required me to hack the code base for to get it working with my former ISP, brinkster, whereas subtext only took about an hour to get going, including transferring all the data from .text and didn’t require any code changes.
I also upgrade the version of flexwiki I’m running; this caused me the most pain for the least gain and ultimately caused me to change ISP. Basically when I upgraded to .NET 2.0 to get the latest version of subtext going flexwiki stopped working, this is because when I asked brinkster to change my account from .NET 1.1 to .NET 2.0 it automatically moved to run under medium trust, this meant all access to any path outside of the web root disappeared and I store my wiki database in directory outside the webroot. Brinkster support guy where quite unhelpful about this issue and eventually told me to make sure all dll where marked with AllowPartiallTrustedCaller and pointed me to the following article (http://forums.brinkster.com/forummessage.asp?id=113605&Forum=23) – not the greatest advent for their service. Anyway, it looks to me like accessing paths outside of the webroot simple will not work in medium trust whether or AllowPartiallTrustedCaller is there or not. I must admit I decided not to test this, as enough is enough and I have said goodbye to brinkster and hopped over to WebHost4Life, they may not be perfect but they give much more control over the way your website runs and are cheaper to boot.
Finally a big thanks to Mads Phikamphon, demon coder and master ninja, who pointed out the website didn’t work in FireFox 2.0, or at least looked a bit misaligned, this is now fixed (thus I finally feel I can make this announcement).
Anyway welcome to the new look strangelights.com, I hope to be blogging a lot more now the book is just about done. I may even talk a bit about life in France, apparently there’s an election on at the moment.