Well I've been working on the new theme for the blog. I have been co-opting the theme from j-maxx.net since it's about the only decent theme I've ever done before. It looks bad in IE due to dashed borders having white space inbetween the dashes instead of the background color.

For some background on the blog. I chose dasBlog as my software due to it having web services built in and has a user base of programmers I look up to. That being said it was originally .NET 1.1 software and the design is getting a bit annoying in some aspects. I'm looking at adding a better syntax highlighter, but adding it so it shows up in all the themes is not straightforward. I may just remove the other themes and only allow this one to simplify things.

I've also noticed that blogs edited after the date they were posted do not show up when you click on the date their were posted in the calendar. I'll have to track that bug down.

All in all it was pretty quick and easy to get the blog up and running. Designing the theme was very easy as well. They did a great job at allowing users to separate design from logic. I'm going to delve more into the templating system to figure out how they did it.

Well I'm finally opening a real blog. Not sure how much I will be updating this but hey I have a real online presence again. The old J-Maxx Net will stay as it is. Still get a decent amount of traffic on there (kicking myself for not installing adsense years ago).

To start off with.. I love LINQ. I've been looking into it for over a year now but finally have a project where I get to use it fully. C# 3.0 has added so many features I no longer pine for PHP as I once did. Here's a sample below of something I wrote the other day.

            var result = from c in CurrentDataContext.Categories
                         join localinfo in CurrentDataContext.CategoryLocalizationInfos
                            on c.CategoryID equals localinfo.CategoryID
                         where c.CategoryID == CategoryID
                         && localinfo.Language == Language
                         select new Business.Data.Category()
                         {
                             ID = c.CategoryID,
                             Description = localinfo.Description,
                             Languages = GetLanguagesForCategory(c.CategoryID),
                             Name = c.Name,
                             SortOrder = c.SortOrder,
                             Title = localinfo.Title,
                             NavImage = c.NavImage,
                             Language = localinfo.Language,
                             Links = GetLinksForCategory(c.CategoryID, Language),
                             IsDataLoadedFromSql = true
                         };