For whatever reason, setting up SubText on GoDaddy is more difficult than elsewhere. Or at least it's been an issue aimaget some point, so much so, that there is a FAQ entry to specifically address this issue. To setup the blog, I followed blog setup instructions outlined here. For email setup, I looked here. Unfortunately, the blog still came up with the yellow screen of ASP.NET death (not the one in the photo), which stated that since I am not on the actual server, I can't see what the actual error is.

So, if you run into the same problem, first step is to find out what the actual problem is.  

  • Open the web.config file from your blog directory.
  • Find the following piece of code:

    <customErrors mode="RemoteOnly" defaultRedirect="~/SystemMessages/Error.aspx">

                     <error statusCode="404" redirect="~/SystemMessages/FileNotFound.aspx"/>

    </customErrors>

 

  • Replace it with the following (note the XML comments):

<customErrors mode="Off"/>                  

                   

<!--   

    <customErrors mode="RemoteOnly" defaultRedirect="~/SystemMessages/Error.aspx">

                    <error statusCode="404" redirect="~/SystemMessages/FileNotFound.aspx"/>

    </customErrors>

-->

 

Now you can actually see the error. It revealed the following problem:

Configuration Error

Description: An error occurred during the processing of a configuration file required to service this request. Please review the specific error details below and modify your configuration file appropriately.

Parser Error Message: This configuration section cannot be used at this path.  This happens when the site administrator has locked access to this section using <location allowOverride="false"> from an inherited configuration file.

Source Error:

Line 377: <system.web>
Line 378: <!-- [Full|High|Medium|Low|Minimal] -->
Line 379: <trust level="Full" originUrl=".*" />
Line 380:
Line 381: <xhtmlConformance mode="Transitional" />

So basically, GoDaddy ain't happy that SubText wants full trust, I think. I've played around with the level setting, by changing it to High and Medium, but the site simply would not come up. I just commented the line out ( <!-- <trust level="Full" originUrl=".*" /> --> ) and all was good in the world.  Later I found out that GoDaddy shared hosting accounts run under Medium trust.

Another thing that tripped me up was the images folder.  The setup instructions referred to by the FAQ mentioned that I should give the images folder similar instructions as that of the root blog folder (although the guy did say that he didn't try that).  This permission messes up Gravatars and Identicons.  Do not give it Set Root permission.  Despite its name, the permission actually means that a virtual directory will be created for that folder.  We don't want that.

After the blog works, you can restore the customErrors tag to its original setting.