I started using DasBlog for this blog almost two years ago.

For the past couple months, I've been struggling trying to add a permanent page to my web site. By permanent, I mean a page that is always relevant and is always available at the top of the site; as opposed to a blog post, which is dated and moves down as new blog posts are added.

My biggest problem is that I wanted the new page to have the same theme as all existing pages. It seemed simple enough but DasBlog did not provide an obvious way to do this.

Recently I discovered an old post by Omar Shahine at http://www.shahine.com/omar/FormatPageMacroInDasBlog.aspx

He described in detail exactly what I wanted to do.

Essentially, I create a file named xxx.format.html and add any static HTML I want on my new page. To apply the theme, I need to use FormatPage.aspx, which ships with DasBlog. FormatPage.aspx accepts a parameter path, which points to an HTML document and displays that document with the current theme applied.

After uploading my HTML page, I can apply a theme by linking to FormatPage.aspx?path=DaveSchedule.format.html.

Now I have a link in a tab at the top of every page pointing to my past and upcoming speaking schedule and that page has the same theme as the rest of the site.