Changing Master Page for SharePoint 2010 Blog Site (Workaround)

So I thought I'd share a quick find with you regarding 2010 blog sites (and may apply to other templates as well). I tried to search for a fix for this but search engines and searching for “SharePoint 2010 Blog master page” proved unsuccessful.
I created a blog site and from site settings changed the master page to a custom developed page (having to enable publishing features to be able to do this through the UI). After applying the master page change the new master page did not render on the blog site.
With credit to my colleague Inderjit Singh (Link to Linkedin) the workaround is to apply the custom master page to the system master page section. This master page setting is for all application pages and site settings pages as shown below.

At this point I must stress that applying the master page to the system may cause many knock-on effects and further testing of each application page will be required to satisfy using and suggesting this to a client and could cause a lot more work with regards to styling.
I strongly believe this is not by design behaviour and have raised this with MS and will as always keep you posted.
Further information about the blog template
Each page in the blog site contains a reference to default.master (known as a token) as show below:
~masterurl/default.master
Changing this reference to custom.master as shown below will render the custom master page selected in the site master page section (shown in the screen grab above):
~masterurl/custom.master
The issue of changing this on each page means that each page becomes un-ghosted potentially causing issues later on and i would strongly advise against recommendations in other blogs to edit the pages directly on the file system as this will fix the issue short term but will cause more problems in the long run.
*** Update 18/05/11 ***
After numerous diagnostic tests I was provided with a support KB that was applicable to MOSS 2007 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/936908. The KB suggests two ways to work around the issue. One of these was to simply enable the publishing feature on the site you need to modify the master page (well you have to do this anyway to be able to change the master page through the UI) and this didn't work. The other option was what I described in my original post above which was to change the system.master which I have explained the issues this could cause by doing so.
This case has now been closed with Microsoft on the basis I have been informed that the blog functionality is classed as collaboration (and not publishing) functionality.
After writing various paragraphs here on my view of the above outcome of the case I felt these were best removed!
I welcome your comments and feedback.

Managed Metadata changes not applied to list items after term change

So scenario is that you have a SharePoint 2010 managed metadata term store up and running and you need to make a change to one of the terms. Lets just say that you have spelt one of the terms wrong and need to update it on all items you have added that have selected this misspelt term.

In my example I have a list of countries in the term store and have spelt England wrong and is spelt Egnland.

Jumping a few steps ahead I have a simple list created with a managed metadata property as shown (Noticing the Tag is spelt incorrectly).

So once the item is committed to the list it will look as shown below.

Navigating back to the term store you make an update to the incorrectly spelt term.

After updating and saving the term navigating back to the list you assume that this change should reflect on the list item. Wrong! A timer job needs to be run to update this on list items.

The timer job in question is the Taxonomy Update Scheduler and this runs every hour. You can manually run this timer job from central admin to force an update making sure that you run the timer job associated to the web application where your list is stored.

Once the timer job ran the list automatically updated (within a matter of seconds).

Adding a custom User Profile Property to SharePoint 2010

This one recently caught me out when creating a custom user profile property and thought I'd share this.

To create a custom user profile property navigate to the the User Profile Service Application –> Manage User Profile Properties and click on New Property.

On the New Property page where you enter all the configuration of the property type right at the bottom there is a ‘Add New Mapping’ section which is where you would sync and connect this to your data connection (noting that my data connection had been removed from view below).

The requirement for my property was simply to be a string value with no connection to a data source and the above section confused me that I needed to add a property regardless. This is not the case and you do not have to add a property at this point for the creation to be successful.

Should you need to add a property mapping to a data source above shows how it looks (again my data connections have been removed).

There are many different mappings that can be configured for creating these properties however my post was simply to make you aware of what caught me out.

Reference: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262327.aspx