Are you getting a lot of spam lately? [BlogEngine](http://dotnetblogengine.net/) has built-in filter and it worked just fine for me up until now. But for the last couple of months I got some spam getting through.
This post is a sequel to [Keeping things private](http://www.rtur.net/blog/post/2008/11/01/Keeping-things-private.aspx) and will explain how to secure images so that only authenticated users can see them. This is relevant when you want to publish private album on the web
Blogging is all about openness, spreading and sharing. Most likely you want as many eyeballs on you blog as possible and blogging software, naturally, optimized for doing just that. But what if you want to keep things private? May be you keep your personal diary online because you want to have access to it from anywhere or you want members only blog for friends or family?
Default admin interface for extensions in [BlogEngine](http://dotnetblogengine.net/) works fine in most cases and very easy to use. But sometimes you just got to get creative, right? That means, you want no limits. Obviously, some of simplicity will be lost – but still it is surprisingly easy to get along using plug-and-play [BlogEngine](http://dotnetblogengine.net/) architecture.
Lets say we want to write an extension to track user activities on our site. Blogger should be able to set basic settings, for example choose to track posts, pages or both. Then every time user requests post or page, we increment corresponding counter by one.
In the first part, we wrote simple extension that changes case in the post to lower. Let’s say, we want user to decide show post in the lower or upper case. For this, we need to be able to maintain variable and let blogger change it’s value through admin interface. Normally, you would need to add a data access functionality for extension to handle this kind of operation, create admin form etc
This is the first part in the series of tutorials about writing extensions for the [BlogEngine](http://dotnetblogengine.net/) 1.4. I’ll start with simple “hello world” example and then gradually move to the more advanced techniques. You don’t need to have any previous experience with BE extensions to follow this tutorial.
Yesterday newly installed Firefox 3 crashed on me at least 10 times, which, I believe, is a new [world record](http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/) (ha-ha). It could be because I am visiting a lot of Microsoft-centric sites that often run Silverlight. It looks like Silverlight 1.0 does not work in FF3 at all and Silverlight 2.0 kills it.
A lot of "power bloggers", prefer to use [Windows Live Writer](http://gallery.live.com/default.aspx?pl=8) instead of built-in web editor. No matter how good web editor is, desktop publishing is just too hard to beat, at least at the moment. I personally like WLW myself and use it whenever I can. But this is not the only choice you have on the desktop; another big one is MS Word 2007.
Preparing for BE 1.4 release, which is coming soon (although exact date not yet set), I started working on documentation for Extension Manage and changes it has compared to previous BE version. This is a short list I came up with. Obviously, I'll have to go into specifics and provide code examples for documentation be useful. This will be on the Wiki as soon as 1.4 released.
We all know about magic App\_Code folder. Just drop class file in there and it will become a part of the web application. This is fine for scripts like PHP or "classic" ASP (VB script), but C# is strongly typed compiled language. How App\_Code works?
For Windows developers trying to diversify their skills and go Mono, setting up environment is probably the most painful experience. We spoiled by Microsoft tricked us into believe that setup and configuration done by repeatedly pressing “ok” button.
