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Because two isn't enough and four is just too many

It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly American criminal class except Congress.
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Brad Butts is a .NET developer and architect. He is married with children and enjoys reading, working out, and genealogy is his five minutes of spare time.
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    The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in anyway.

    © Copyright 2008

    BlogEngine.NET

    Well, after months of messing around looking at dasBlog, Subtext, DotNetNuke, and others, I finally landed on BlogEngine.NET v1.3.0.0 on which to build my website.  The thing is, though, I really don't want this site to be exclusively about blogging: if I did, I'd probably go really simple and do something with wordpress or blogger.  Ideally, I'd like some portion of my site to host some as-of-yet-unknown genealogy application and maybe dedicate other portions for other purposes (maybe a code garage sale).  The other thing is, I'm lazy and don't necessarily want to start a website from scratch--plus, I've been eager to explore some of these much-talked-about starter kits.  

    Microsoft has a great list of starter kits, but none of them have blog engine components quite like those mentioned above.  Oh...one more thing...I'm pretty cheap and bought a pretty basic hosting package--i.e. no SQL server database package.  So, not wishing to persist my blog content to the mighty MS Access database, that seems to narrow my choices down to the XML file based BlogEngine.NET.  Not that that in any way diminishes the power of that platform.  I do like BlogEngine.NET for the most part.  I like how it leverages many aspects of the ASP.NET 2.0 framework including extending the membership provider model, http handlers and modules (for url rewriting), generics/predicates, and so forth.

    Here's some modifications I made:
    1. Added code to the XML membership provider to hash and salt passwords (I did add the fix for the recent security issue, too, not that it hurt me too badly since my passwords were already hashed)
    2. Wrote a quote control so that I can display a favorite quote with every page request
    3. Wrote a dynamic menu control so I can dynamically build my top menu from an XML file
    4. Fixed a bug with the gravatar display
    5. Added support for Silverlight 1.0

    I think that's about all the changes I made to my current deployment of BlogEngine.NET, but my real goal was to create a site that could support multiple, distinct blogs.   There's been some discussion on how to make BlogEngine.NET appear to support multiple blogs--namely, by placing multiple instances of BlogEngine.NET in different sub-directories or subdomains.  I was hoping I could do the same by creating a few subdomains and hosting a new instance of the code in each, but my hosting provider doesn't appear to be able to support more than one ASP.NET 2.0 application per domain, so I begrudgling put up a single instance of the platform (what you're seeing now) and pretend I'm hosting multiple blogs by calling each category a blog.  Incidentally, is it common for a host provider to allow me to have only one ASP.NET application under my domain name?  It seems to me that if IIS 5.1 can support N number of ASP.NET applications under a single localhost site, surely my host provider could do the same.  

    Anyway, a while back, I started drammatically extending BlogEngine.NET to support multiple blogs.  I got pretty far along, but I stopped when I started working on the controls.  If I'm looking at Blog X, I want all the controls in the sidebar to only show me content from Blog X: recent posts, comments, archive, authors, tags, categories--these should all be filtered to show just Blog X content.  It appeared to be a lot of work to remediate these controls, so I stopped--thinking it would be quicker to deploy multiple instances of BlogEngine.NET to my domain--only later to find out that my host provider wouldn't support such a thing.  So, in the near or far future, I'll probably resume my efforts to extend the platform for multiple blogs.  Either that or look into other people's work in this space.

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    Categories: Technology Blog
    Posted by Brad on Wednesday, May 14, 2008 5:31 PM
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