3 posts tagged “blog”
I have a site or two that I want to add News and/or Articles to. I basically want to add a Blog to the site. However, I don't want the user to have to leave the rest of the site to go to the "blog" page(s). I want to be able to put the blog on a portion of some of the pages of the site and if the user links into one of the articles, I want the article page to look just like the rest of the site -- with the same navigation and everything.
I've decided to write my own blog engine to accomplish this. I'll be building it with .NET, since I do most of my sites and programming with .NET. I figure the main things it has to do are as follows:
- have some kind of interface to accept a new post (by me only to start with) -- at first this might be a very manual process until I develop a nicer admin page type interface later
- be able to save/persist the content of the post to include a headline, the body of the post, some information about the poster and possibly images referenced in the post. It will have to allow some html tags such as bold (<b>) tags, hyperlinks, and img tags. I'll save this information into a database rather than files.
- create a URL for each post (a permalink). Rather than create an actual file for each post and naming the file based on the headline, I'll probably just have a convention like: "Article.aspx?id=312", where the id value is the unique identifier for the particular article. Later I might create a dummy name for the post based on the headline and store that in the database with the article. Then I might create something called an HttpModule that will be able to translate the post name back into the id value and correctly redirect from "site/Articles/sample_headline" to "site/Article.aspx?id=312".
- update the rss xml file(s) for each new article posted. I'll just view the source xml of some blogs and decide what parts are really necessary. I noticed that my vox blog has a "summary" feed and a "complete" feed. The summary feed has thumbnail versions of the images and only the first sentence or two of content.
- eventually allow people to post comments. This isn't a top priority for me, but I do plan on adding this feature. I'll probably only accept comments from registered users and then just save the comment in the database linked to the article and their user record.
- allow people to easily subscribe to the blog. If you view the source of my vox blog, you'll see several link tags that refer to syndication files for the blog. My guess is that containing a similar link in the main page will include the rss icon for the page in most current browsers.:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" href="http://jakekerber.vox.com/library/posts/atom-full.xml" title="Full Atom Feed for Posts" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="http://jakekerber.vox.com/library/posts/rss.xml" title="RSS Feed for Posts" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="http://jakekerber.vox.com/library/posts/rss-full.xml" title="Full RSS Feed for Posts" />
After some searching, I found a post about creating a blog engine using some new features of ASP.NET. I probably won't do it quite the way the author of the article went about it, but this might be a good reference. The site, aspalliance.com seems to have a lot of articles for .NET developers.
Something else I found was BlogEngine at CodePlex.com. They have the complete source code you can download, so I might take a look at some of the things they've done to get some tips, too.
Hopefully I'll have something ready to use in a couple weeks. I do NOT plan on releasing this to the public (either for free or for sale). It will be very custom and will be integrated into some of my other code. It would probably cost significant additional effort on my part to make it generic enough for it to be useful to anyone else. But anything's possible and I won't completely rule out the possibility of having something to distribute (full of disclaimers, though). ;)
I have too many things I want to blog about today (an unusual concern at times and probably a good problem to have), so I'm just going to start with the first thing on my mind.
I attended the first ever Des Moines Tweetup last night. There were about 6 of us there. I had previously met only one: blogging evangelist Mike Sansone (@mikesansone). Also in attendance were: Nathan T. Wright (@nathantwright), the organizer of the Tweetup; Andy Brudtkuhl (@abrudtkuhl) (I'll need to learn how to pronounce that one) who's a fellow developer and tech blogger; Mike Templeton (@miketempleton), a marketing specialist at The Members Group trying to infuse new media into the company; and Scott Phillips (@scottatdrake), who I didn't get to talk to much, but I expect I'll see him around.
Pretty much everyone who attended is a blogger of some form. I learned much more about the Iowa blogger community than I knew previously. Through some of their blogs and other people we discussed last night, I discovered the I-List, a list of Iowa-based bloggers being maintained by Focal Point.
We discussed how we each use Twitter and very few of us actually use text messaging, which is usually the one part about Twitter that people know about. Some use the twitter web page, but have to refresh it every so often because it doesn't auto-refresh (something we complained about). Others have messages routed to IM clients. Some use twitter-specific applications like twitterrific (on the mac) or tweetr on the PC. I'll probably install and start using tweetr pretty soon. I currently miss out on a bunch because I only have a notifications sent to my phone via text for a handful of people I follow. I of course have unlimited text messaging on my mobile plan.
One cool thing that happened (for me) is that several of the attendees had read that post I made yesterday about the tweetup before we got together, having never met me before. There's something to this whole new media, blogging, social networking thing! ;)
Another outcome of the meetup for me is that I'll start using RSS more again. Previously I got so overwhelmed that I stopped using an RSS reader altogether. I'm going to look into Cullect, something I learned about last night that helps separate out the good stuff in your RSS reader from the noise.
Wow! Two posts in two days. I'm pretty sure that's a first for me (but probably not the last). Thanks to everyone last night for the inspiration!
I first heard about Twitter from Leo Laporte probably close to a year ago now. I just never signed up. Leo tries everything and I figured I'd give it time and see if it caught on some more. Boy did it ever. I just started using it about a week ago finally and I'm hooked.
Twitter is a web-based application that basically links your mobile device (phone) with SMS to a mini blog. You send an SMS message (a "tweet") to Twitter and it posts it to your blog. It also sends that message to the Twitter users that "follow" you. Often, people just post an update about what they're currently doing (like your Facebook status).
Leo doesn't use it much anymore because of possible intellectual property confusion with his TWiT brand. He talks about using Jaiku instead (pronounced like Haiku with a "J" (JI - koo), even though I think the creators are something like Danish, not Japanese). Jaiku looks more mature and seems to have more features, but Twitter has the crowds. So for this type of social application, it looks like Twitter's still on top (for now).
One cool thing about Twitter is that since the messages have to be short (140 characters or less), it's not that intimidating to create an entry. Since I'm "twittering" multiple times a day, it's not that much of a stretch to create a regular blog entry (here on Vox, for example) a bit more often.
A feature they just added is the ability to track any given key phrase. Then any time somebody made a tweet with that phrase, it would be sent to you. Then you could find more about that person and perhaps follow them and become twitter pals. I'll probably start tracking "Des Moines", etc. and see if I can meet some fellow Twitter users in the local area.
If you want to find me at Twitter, my username is just jakekerber.
