I'm switching to dasBlog 1.6 too and moving the blog to the front page of the site come the end of the month. Be ready.

The two .NET apps I use for most of my blog related activities have been updated recently.

• DasBlog 1.3 powers this blog. DasBlog 1.6 was released over the weekend. Apart from looking a lot spiffier, there's a whole raft of changes and improvements since 1.5.
• RssBandit v1.2.0.112 was also released over the weekend. It now supports Atom 0.3, autocompletion, and a lot more. It's also a lot faster than previous versions.

One of the DasBlog project leads, Omar Shahine is also building a neat little add-on for OneNote. Rss2OneNote looks like it could be very handy.

First problems already - with dasBlog, the engine running this page. Seems it doesn't completely like running in a subfolder of a site. You may have noticed if you click on HMobius Notes at the top of the page, you get sent to default.aspx rather than default.htm. It also generates some of the locations for its images at the wrong place too. hmobius.com/images/picname rather than hmobius.com/notes/images/picname. Bug reported and offending images duly copied to requested folder until Clemens and crew fix the problem.

Right then, standards here we come. I’ve got my half-price copy of Zeldman’s book and I’m not afraid to use it. First crack - write some core pages in XHTML 1.1? Why 1.1 and not 1.0? Because it’s there mostly. I’d use XHTML 2.0 except that it will keep changing and if I’m that desperate I could always transform it with a style sheet anyway later on. And I know it won’t be completely valid XHTML 1.1 because the right MIME-Type isn’t served up to browsers that give a damn, but at least the xml is a start, yes? Supplemental pages will appear later.

First stop - validation. The W3C provides a validation service for (X)HTML, CSS and WAI standards. Just plug in the address of the page you want validated and sit back in horror as you are told how many things are actually wrong with it. Mixed case tags, quotes and equal signs looks like being the killers. Oops. Looks like VS Whidbey has some ace validation options too. Favelets.com tries to provide an easier way of getting your page to the validator as well. Pretty nice, but watch for the Mac-only ones.

First few tweaks added to. Replaced usual apostrophe character ' with this one ’ which is apparently the typographically correct apostrophe. Doesn’t matter for browsing but will do when pages are printed.