*** I thought I would repost this three-part blog from StGelais.com GBlog.NET category. It kind of fits right into this category too. ***
Part 3 - January 2, 2009 04:11
It’s now Christmas Day and I all I can think about is the Guest Book. I am missing one of the features that made StGelais.com really cool. If you have never looked through the old Guest Book, you should. Here’s the link: http://www.stgelais.com/gblog/OldGB.aspx. It’s interesting to read messages from people you have never meet, but know only from their visit to the web site. I lost the date tag on the guest book a few years back when I changed servers, so only the first few years have the date visited tag. Next to the genealogy section, that was my next priority!
“Never Under Estimate the Universe!” is what one of my favorite t-shirts says. And it is true! In my search for a Guest Book on Christmas morning, I went over to CodePlex (http://www.codeplex.com), Microsoft's open source project hosting web site. It was there that I found BlogEngine.NET (http://www.dotnetblogengine.net). Here are some of the features:
- Multi-author support
- Pingbacks and trackbacks
- Event based for plug-in writers
- Theming directly in master pages and user controls
- Gravatar and coComments implemented
- Live preview on commenting
- Comment moderation
- BlogML import/export
- Extension model
- Code syntax highlighting
- Mono support
- Full editing and creation of pages that are not posts
- Extended search capabilities
- Tag cloud
- Self updating blogroll
- Runs entirely on XML or SQL Server
It was just what I was looking for. But, it does have some draw backs that I had to accept and work around. First one being that the blogengine is an application itself, and it wants to be in the root directory. If you put it in a sub-directory, once the visitor goes into that directory, they cannot get back out to the ‘true’ root directory, just the ‘virtual’ root directory. Think of it this way, you have a website running inside of another website. And the one on the inside does not ‘see’ the one on the outside.
I wanted the blog to be a part of the site, not the whole site being a blog. Well, it meant formatting a separate set of master page files. I had already done that. One for the whole site and another that references the main master page into the genealogy master page (that’s where the second toolbar comes from). It was clear that if I did some ‘hard’ coding, this was possible. And it would look like just another part of the site.
Well, it’s now January 2nd, 2009 and the site is up and running beautifully. I spent New Years Day cleaning up the site and adding in a ‘Downloads’ section. I tweaked the side menu for the GBlog and added some posts. The holidays are over now and they seemed to have never happen to me. I was so wrapped up in the new web site.
I know a lot of people will think I’m a ‘workaholic’, working both Christmas and New Years Days on StGelais.com, but the truth is I wanted some thing to take my mind off of the fact that this was the first holiday season without my mother. The ‘Universe’ had given me a challenge that it knew I could not resist, an unrealistic deadline on a major project. It knew that I pride myself on making unrealistic deadlines. A “Thank You” goes to the ‘Universe’.
You may think that this is the end of the story, but you would be wrong, this is only part of a bigger story. The reference to GiP through out this series is ‘Geeks in Phoenix’ (http://www.geeksinphoenix.com), another of my web sites. This is the ‘sister’ site to StGelais.com (you’ll notice in the upper left hand corner of this site the ‘Geeks in Phoenix’ logo). As I was building the GBlog at StGelais.com, I also built one at GiP. StGelais.com is turning out to be a testing site for GiP. The possibilities are endless now…
Until my next post, remember that every morning is a “brand new day” (anybody else hearing ‘Sting’ in the background…),
Scott