I modified my Google Reader Pick's box there on the right to be compatible with the new widget framework of BlogEngine.NET, and here's the code if you want to use it in your own blog.

All you have to do is upload the "Google Reader Picks" folder to the widget folder, and configure it for your account.

The most important property is your User Id, which you can get from your Google Reader homepage, clicking on "Shared Items", like this

Then, you can go to the configuration file clicking on the edit link

• User ID is the user id you have in your Google Reader Homepage.
• Color Scheme is the color of the list, you can experiment with it, but for the standard blogengine theme I recommend setting it to "none".
• Items is how many items to show
• Show item sources adds a link to the original feed
• Add Xfn Link adds a hidden link with the rel="me" tag for Google's Social Graph API

And the result looks like this

You can download it from the following link, any feedback is appreciated, this is my first widget =)

Google Reader Picks.zip (2.99 kb)

As you can see at the bottom of this page, I am now powered by BlogEngine.NET 1.4

If you are still using some standard blogging provider, I recommend you get you own hosting and install this blogging engine, nothing beats having absolute control over everything... yes world, you are next!

Some of the new features include (from the official site):

New database provider
BlogEngine.NET now works with most commercial and open source databases such as MySQL, SQL Server, VistaDB and many others. This allow you to use practically any database supported by your hosting provider. You can still use XML files if you don't want to use a database.

Drag 'n drop widgets
Widgets are the pieces of content most often located at the sidebar. It could be a list of recent posts, latest tweets from Twitter or anything else. You can drag and drop the widgets around in your sidebar and modify the content of them directly on the front-page. The widget works independently of the theme you are using as long as it is implemented in the theme. In BlogEngine.NET it is implemented in the Standard and Indigo themes and many more themes with widgets will be available for download very soon at the BlogEngine.NET website.

Extension settings
The new settings model for extensions have been upgraded to give you a much better experience using third-party extensions. For extension developers, it has never been easier to store your settings and let the user change them from the admin section. The same settings model is used by the widgets as well.

Web 3.0 improvements
BlogEngine.NET 1.4 makes full use of many semantic formats and technologies such as FOAF, SIOC and APML. It means that the content stored in your BlogEngine.NET installation will be fully portable and auto-discoverable. It is possible to filter the RSS feeds based on the visitor's interest defined in her APML file or do a site search with it as well. Read more the APML filtering in BlogEngine.NET.

Author profiles
By utilizing the ASP.NET profile provider it is now possible to let all authors maintain their own profile. This is used in the FOAF document and widget/extension developers can take full advantage of the profiles to provide new exciting visualizations and functionality.

Other new features
We've listened to what you - the user - wanted in BlogEngine.NET 1.4 and here is a list of some of those features that made it.

• Tag selector when adding new posts
• Subcategories
• Password encryption
• Improved live comment preview
• Hierarchical pages in the control panel
• Smarter comment spam protection
• Link collection widget
• Various performance improvements
• and much more...

I don't know why Jean-Claude Manoli's code formatter wasn't working correctly for aspx code even though the code was prepared for it for what I saw; so I modified it a little (the problem may have been me though)

I really HATE regular expressions, so this code I added is most probably far from correct, but I got it working after trial and errors, and debugging. Feel free to improve it, but I'm not interested in lessons on RegEx because I don't really want to have anything to do with them =)

The output from the original code was this:

And with my little modification, it changes to this:

Here is the class I modified

and the entire project with that class in it

All credit goes to Jean-Claude Manoli

The next step is coloring class names like VS.NET 2008, but that is a little more complicated I think... 

I've been reading a lot about xfn and the semantic web, and I really like it... I love the idea of creating a web of connections between everyone I know, of centralising relationships, and all that.

So I've created an endpoint in my blog, in order to exchange links with bloggers and extend this network of relationships, check it out, let me know what you think, and contact me if you are interested in being added to the list.

Oh, and start using xfn in your blogs.

I recently became aware of a blog called coding horror, by Jeff Atwood (yes, the name is in honor of Steve McConnell's Code Complete), and wanted to recommend it to all my readers =)

You can always read the posts I find more interesting by checking out my Google Reader Picks box right there on the sidebar, but I wanted to recommend the blog in general, and one article in particular that I think is essential everyone reads, called "Remember, this stuff is supposed to be fun". It really inspired me to read it…

Go check it out, but don't forget to come back here!