The other day I got sick and tired of the fact that I didn't have labels on my entires... sure Blogger Beta allows for that, but you have to be on their server to use it (and understandably so). So last weekend I wrote my own blog engine in .NET 2.0. Sure I could have used a pre-built one (like DasBlog), but I kinda like the level of control I get from using things with my architecture and my coding style. Yes, I know that's a ridiculous and somewhat arrogant excuse, but I really do like to have it in my own architecture and design even if own as a training tool I can use in the future.

Anyhow... the new system has been up for a few days and if you see any weird behavior on it (like a blog entry link taking you to the homepage or whatever), please be assured that I get a notification e-mail about the problem and will quickly look into it. I'm still considering it in "beta".

With the new blog engine you can access labels to view various entires at once as well as see articles by month by going to http://www.netfxharmonics.com/year/month/ like http://www.netfxharmonics.com/2006/10/.

There are various other nice internal features too, like the ability for each entry to have more than one URL. Some of my blog entries are actually linked via different links, so that's something that is definitely important to me.

Oh, how did I do that you ask? HttpHandlers! These ASP.NET pieces of goodness are great. My entire blog is really just one public page: default.aspx (plus the internal supporting user controls, masterpage and clientside JavaScript and CSS pages). There isn't really a link called http://www.netfxharmonics.com/2005/12/video-1-fwd-setting-up-your-firefox.aspx. When ASP.NET sees that URL being requested, the HttpHandler parses it and sends the information off to the default.aspx page which then looks up the blog entry data (via an adapter which then accesses LLBLGen) and sends that data back to the client who thinks that's a real page (even Google indexes it as a real page).

Another cool thing is something I mentioned before: each page can have more than one url. So, for example, the following two URLs show the same data (via a simple lookup in a table which contains the URL names).

As far as tracking, I did throw in a simple tracking system so I can log all traffic via IP address, session, and many other things. I really only did that so I can watch myself go through the site for debugging purposes. My REAL tracking is done via the awesome Google Analytics service which I have been using since it's release. I even have it on all the e-commerce sites we host at the office (replacing WebTrends!). Google Analytics is awesome. Google is awesome!

This weekend I'm going to be builtng in a Atom/RSS creation system that will give a feed to FeedBurner for the RSS subscribers to see (if you aren't using FeedBurner to serve your feeds, you really should--it abstracts the URL from your site so you can change your REAL feed location all you want and it gives you great stats as well). I'm actually going to implement my IAP (doesn't really stand for anything) engine which allows developers to dynamically create report templates and RSS feeds declaratively. We also use this at the office... it's actually really cool. It's not only an RSS server, but also an RSS aggregator. So, at the office, we use my IAP engine in the company portal to show blocks of information (they are simply RSS feeds shown via a custom ASP.NET control like ). So... implementing the new RSS system should be really simple.

As far as a client... I think that the web is kind of a hassle for client work. Personally I've grown to hate it. Back in the day I was all about web applications. I thought they were so cool, but I'm all about smart clients now. So, I wrote my blog editing application in WPF which, naturally, communicates with the server via WCF. The interface was rather simple to build in WPF as WPF it has the the advantages of WinForms with regard to simplicity and the power and awesome control tree model of ASP.NET. Great stuff...

The internal database is SQL Server 2005 Express. I swear... that thing is so cool. I've been using it for some time now and I have to say that I SO don't see myself ever needing the standard edition. Even at the office we don't need the standard edition for most of our databases (our CRM system needs standard for it's 60GB database, but other than that... Express works great). Oh... and YES, LLBLGen Pro 2.0 is the data access layer. That thing is so awesome.

As far as hosting. I love abstraction and delegation, so I don't see myself ever doing self-hosting. That said, I'm always looking for the best deal. That doesn't mean LOWEST price. "Best deal" in my situation is a metric of many factors. So, I use CrystalTech's dedicated web hosting for hosting the site (as well as MANY others) and I use the same box for my development work as well. It may just be a Celeron, but I have 1GB of RAM it in with everything I need. I can do anything from WPF to WF to WCF to Atlas on this thing. Granted I have to work with my own DNS and IIS configuration... but, serious, if you can't do that, you shouldn't even be in the biz.

I think that covers most everything. So, if you see something weird in the system, I can almost guarantee that there was an internal exception thrown and that I was notified of it with detailed in information of the failure.

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