Blog from Scratch

Introduction

Creating a blog from scratch is not a clever thing to do. There are too many out there already (DasBlog , Blogger , WordPress ). Blog is the new Hello World. However, having played with a couple of them over the years, I found myself frustrated - some being too simple, some too complex. In the end I wanted a blog specific to my evolving requirements. I also wanted an online note-taking system that would allow me to categorise my personal notes in a hierarchical/journal/wiki structure; and then to move a select few into a public blog format.

History

• 02-Apr-2009 > Initial Version
• Sourced my layout from Ars Technica -- thanks :-)
• Sourced my CCS -- thanks :-)
• Created my own internal Article XML format
• Created my own breed of wiki-syntax from wikipedia
• Integrated a magnificent JavaScript Syntax Highlighter from alexgorbatchev.com
• 03-Apr-2009
• Added Attachments for code, images
  
  Fig. 001 -- Test Image from ARS Tech
  , zip [SourceHighlighter.zip], See Content Disposition
• 04-Apr-2009 > Alpha Version
• Content-Disposition for Attachment Downloads
• Browse By Tag
• Indented Lists prefix with oo and ooo
• Article Single View
• Push blog-roll to DomainRoot
• Login & Security with Cookies.
• I tried to use Response.Cookie.Add(new HttpCookie(...)) but failed while setting it directly worked Response.Cookies["XXX"] = "YYY";
• Deployment Scripts and Cleanup
• Options for INLINE images { Frame }
• Inline Code Snippets
• Google analytics
• URL Rewriting also for Articles IDs; Article.aspx?ID=XXX -> /Article/XXX
• 9 to 14-Apr-2009
• Refactor Visibility to Channels, updated security appropriately
• Admin Features
• Edit Article
• Rename Article files by ArticleID
• RSS syndication, with the aid of the open source library rss-net
• 15, 16-Apr-2009 to present
• Encrypt/7Zip local files
• Added google.com verification
• Add a favicon
• Filter pages for each page (Default, Browse*, Article, RSS)
• Limit the number of items on the home page to 20
• Google search optimisations
• Niggling bugs (missing images, attachments missing, etc)
• Article Comments
• Logoff
• Journal Features
• Journal View (Twitter-style, but integrated to blog and wiki)
• Added Twitter REST integration, a post to the journal of type=Twitter will automatically update twitter
• Added Search functionality

Nice to haves

• Multiple Renderers
• HTML
• Text
• WPF
• Summary View

• Web Services for ArticleRepository
• Security
• Support for large data, many files
• OpenID 
• Wiki Functionality
• Differentiate Wiki URI markup vs blog. Ie a wiki link will not contain the | found in normal links
• Wiki-links that do not exist can be created by clicking on them
• Wiki/Blog are stored seperately, can articles can be converted easily. They share the same XML format.
• When rendering a blog article, wiki-links are ignored.

Google Search Engine Optimisations

• Added link directly
• Added google.com verification
• Added: Add google.com sitemap
• Added URL Rewrites to capture the old blog URL from google. TODO: Test after deployed live
• Created a google analytics account
• Updated by Blogger account to point back to the new site
• Blogger used weblogs.com to ping, so I registered for that - the site says that I fail RSS validation.

Notes & Findings

• HOWTO make a UL-tag list display horizontally
• CSS padding vs. margin
  
  Fig. 003 -- CSS margin vs. padding
• C# DateTime Formats
• HOWTO encode HTML with a static function? HttpUtility.HtmlEncode("Encode This String");
• Added Google WebMaster Tools
• RSS Specification is maintained by the RSS Avisory Board, they also have an online RSS validation tool, which I currently fail
• I always forget how to escape/encode a System.String to the appropriate HTML-friendly string. Answer: Use HttpServerUtility.HtmlEncode the only proble being this is not a static method. You can retrieve it with {{{HttpContext.Current.Server.HtmlEncode}} but this will only work with a web app.
• Complete list of HTML escape characters
• URL Rewriting did not work. See
• Getting URL Rewriting working was not easy.
• Simple rewriting worked with the ASP.NET simple development web server, but not IIS6 when deployed. This is because only .ASPX (and a few others) are mapped to the ASP.NET ISAPI dll.
• http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/02/26/tip-trick-url-rewriting-with-asp-net.aspx
• How to Configure wildcard url rewriting in IIS6, IIS7
• Open Source URL Rewriter for .NET

Concept: Journal

• I want to be able to make twitter like updates (which may get posted to twitter automatically)
• I want to be able to jot down very fast notes (which may later become blog or wiki posts)
• I want to create a list of books, ordered by time using the book:// or book-name:// notation
• I want to create a link dump of interresting read (this should have the ability to retrieve the TITLE of the URL automatically)
• The site (new/changes to pages) should be published as news in the Journal