Rants Tagged with “Website”
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Now that the change to Wildermuth.com is complete I've gotten questions about broken links and such. I am keeping adoguy.com around and redirecting (permanent) the links so that old links aren't going to break. I don't plan on keeping it forever but for several years you can be sure. Its worth keeping them around.
I didn't just do a quick and dirty port to a new CSS look and feel though. This was a conversion of the old code. I don't use a blog engine but write my own code, mostly as a test bed for new ideas. What was it this time? Two thinks significant changed: Entity Framework/LINQ as the data access and the ASP.NET Routing Framework instead of .aspx links. Let's take these one at a time:
The use of the Entity Framework and LINQ was pretty straightforward. I used LLBLGen Pro in my old site to do the data access and it held up great. I only switched so I could test out the Entity Framework on a production-ish system. Not because of any limitations in the old code. Creating a model with the Entity Framework was a snap. My data is not complicated so I didn't have any complex scenarios. The only think I did do was change the collection names from singular to plural. Being able to use LINQ to do my queries, search and paging was just spectacularly useful. I am completely in the LINQ camp now.
The second testbed was the new ASP.NET Routing Framework . What is the ASP.NET Routing Framework you say? Many of you have heard of ASP.NET MVC. The ASP.NET Routing Framework is the code that does all the custom routing for MVC. The ASP.NET Routing Framework is going to be released with .NET 3.5 SP1, not part of MVC so its not expected to change nearly as much as I expect MVC to mature. In that light, I couldn't port my site to MVC wholly because of the limitations in ViewState and ControlState. I could have worked around these limitations but I wanted to be able to focus on the new pieces and not have to re-write every page of the application (or use client-side libraries). So I found the middle ground of the ASP.NET Routing Framework. I am using Phil Haack'd great WebFormRouting class to do much of the heavy work of not only routing to the pages but sending the same sort of context that I could have used with MVC. Its much better than digging into the Response variables IMHO. You will note that most of the pages are now tail-less (e.g. http://adoguy.com/rants.aspx is now http://wildermuth.com/rants) though the old tail'd versions still work for backwards compatibility. I was able to simple tail-less versions by using his class (note the 2nd one uses an optional URI part):
routes.Map("Search").To("~/Search.aspx");
routes.Map("Rants/{page}").To("~/Rants.aspx");
I also set up my Rant URI's like so:
routes.Map("{year}/{month}/{day}/{topic}.aspx").To("~/ViewRant.aspx");
routes.Map("{year}/{month}/{day}/{topic}").To("~/ViewRant.aspx");
There was a challenge I had that I wanted the tail-less URI's but I am hosted on Windows 2003 (which means IIS6). I bit the perf bullet though and mapped all requests through ASP.NET. This means that all requests are running through ASP.NET which can be slower but I thought it was worth the better URI model. IIS7 can do the tail-less URI's without having to resort to everything being a ASP.NET request. Here's a good article on setting up IIS6: http://biasecurities.com/blog/2008/how-to-enable-pretty-urls-with-asp-net-mvc-and-iis6/. You can also accomplish it with URL re-writing but if I wanted to do URL re-writing why'd I use the routing framework instead of re-writing them all?
Its been a fun exercise as well as a re-branding effort. I hope everyone likes the new site!
After a heavy month of re-creating the website (using ASP.NET's new routing framework, not a full ASP.NET MVC), I am finally ready to launch my new blog site. The old ADO Guy website is now Wildermuth.com!
As most of you know, I have been dipping into a lot of different waters and the moniker of ADO Guy has no longer been descriptive enough. Sure I won't every abandon my database-centric view of the world. Please update your links. I've attempted to keep as many of the old URL's working but I am apt to have missed some. Please let me know when you find them. All of the old content should now be available on the new site.
The old ADOGuy.com address will stay around a while, but please update your feeds to point to:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/ShawnWildermuth
Enjoy and feedback is welcomed!
UPDATE: Bad Feed Address. Please use http://feeds.feedburner.com/ShawnWildermuth
I am looking for a volunteer. I am completing a new website to help groups around the country (US and Canada only in the first go-round) organize Geek Dinners in their own areas. Getting the site up and running is working pretty well so far (ASP.NET, AJAX Virtual Earth and Silverlight are all used in the mix so far). But what I need is somone who is good at website visuals to help me with a couple of things for the site. I have a decent template from Six Shooter Media but I need some work done to create some buttons, a menu and a logo for the site. If you're interested please send me a quick e-mail with your availability by clicking here.
My site is experiencing a lot of downtime the last couple of days as my host is being DDOS'd. Just a fair warning to those who can't get to my site...sorry...hopefully they find the bastards!
I've reworked my web site. It was looking a bit more like the uniform of a NASCAR driver than a web site, so I reworked the layout to make it cleaner. I admittedly stole many of my ideas from other web sites and templates I saw.
The other reason for the change was to eliminate ViewState. I noticed my pages ballooning from the sheer size of the HTML that was being generated, much of it as ViewState. I've eliminated ViewState in almost every case. For example, the size of the HTML of my home page was reduced from 134K to 48K. That's just HTML size, not images...so the real size change should be even more dramatic.
Let me know what you think and if you find anything not working. Thanks!
One of the things that I've always loved is mixed metaphors. I've added a new section to the site. Please submit any mixed metaphors you've heard!
Thanks!
I've added a couple of new features (thanks to Chris Sells for QA'ing it for me):
- You can now click on your name in the logon header (if you've registered) to edit details about your account and change/reset your password.
- If you have registered, I automatically pre-populate the Add Comments Name/Website for you.
Welcome to the new version of The ADO Guy. Most of the changes are under the covers, but there are a few things to note:
- No more collapsable sections (some of you didn't like them and I agreed).
- Registration is now required to ask questions. I've gotten a lot of abuse from my open way to submit questions. I am sorry to have to resort to this, but I am hoping this will help the process not hurt it. User information will only be used for questions and communication about them.
- Some visual changes, but not many.
Please let me know what you like and don't like. A couple of things aren't working yet:
- Searching quesitons is disabled for now. It'll return soon.
- The Book Owners area is disabled. This will return very very soon.
UPDATE: Comments aren't working...Yet.
Not sure what happened but I broke comments, both through the site and through CommentAPI. Wahoo!
