Advice - Blog / Website

Ciphon · 2 Aug 2010 at 17:29

Hello All,

I'm still fairly new to all of this web development & design.. and I'm just after a bit of advice really.

I'd like to make a website of my own, which is mainly a blog more than anything, with maybe a few side bits.

The only thing is that I don't know how to store the pages. One thing I don't want to be doing is setting up a brand new page for every single blog post that I create.

My idea was that I basically have a home page.. and that's it! I post all of my blog posts on this page, then use paging to divide the site up a little bit... say 5 posts on each page..

Is this a good idea? Mainly for SEO / Efficiency.

One thing that I do want out of this (as a development project) is to learn more ASP.Net (C#) and CSS..

Any idea's or advice welcome... Thanks

ringo747 · 2 Aug 2010 at 18:11

Simple advice would be to use Wordpress.

mr.sly · 2 Aug 2010 at 18:27

I was going to suggest that, but the last line makes me think he wants to build his own blogging platform using ASP.net as a project to learn more ASP.net.

Ciphon · 2 Aug 2010 at 18:48

ringo747 said:
Simple advice would be to use Wordpress.

Just had a quick look at wordpress and it's lovely! Especially in this example:

http://goalmouth.blogs.cnn.com/

This is pretty much exactly how I'd like my site to look in terms of the way the blog posts are displayed...

But... Having downloaded WordPress from their site, it appears that it's written in PHP.. which I don't know and don't plan on learning (at the moment).

I'm sure that actual set up of wordpress is actually very simple, and it really does look nice - but then any code that I did want to write in ASP.net / C# wouldn't work along side it - would it?

mr.sly said:
I was going to suggest that, but the last line makes me think he wants to build his own blogging platform using ASP.net as a project to learn more ASP.net.

I wouldn't mind using the WordPress if any ASP.net could work along side it?

Basically - I want a website.. If I learn something along the way (preferrably to do with my work - MS SQL / C#) then brilliant.. but it isn't necessary.

mr.sly · 2 Aug 2010 at 18:56

I honestly have no idea.

http://www.microsoft.com/web/wordpress/

Maybe that page can help you out getting it setup with SQL Server. Then play around from there.

Ciphon · 2 Aug 2010 at 21:22

A friend of mine has just suggested ASP.net MVC.. apparently there are some blogging templates that come with this, so maybe I'll give this ago.

Has anyone used MVC before?

Edit: Or alternatively.. does anyone know of any blogging software similar to WordPress written in .net?

Ciphon · 3 Aug 2010 at 09:36

I've pretty much decided that I'd like to build my own, simply because it would be some good experience for me. I'll be using ASP.net (C#).. but not MVC.

The only thing I'm really stuck on is how to store each blog post? Then have a page that you can go to with the full article and comments ect.. much like the CNN WordPress examble in one of my above posts.

I'm guessing that I'll need to store the blog posts in a database table, then the comments in a seperate table linked via a foreign key.

My only question is getting any text and images back out.. How does it keep it's formatting / hyper links / images? Or am I thinking about this in completely the wrong way?

Inquisitor · 3 Aug 2010 at 09:45

Ciphon said:
I've pretty much decided that I'd like to build my own, simply because it would be some good experience for me. I'll be using ASP.net (C#).. but not MVC.

The only thing I'm really stuck on is how to store each blog post? Then have a page that you can go to with the full article and comments ect.. much like the CNN WordPress examble in one of my above posts.

I'm guessing that I'll need to store the blog posts in a database table, then the comments in a seperate table linked via a foreign key.

My only question is getting any text and images back out.. How does it keep it's formatting / hyper links / images? Or am I thinking about this in completely the wrong way?

You'd store the post content either as raw HTML or as some kind of intermediate markup language like Markdown.

Ciphon · 3 Aug 2010 at 10:08

Inquisitor said:
You'd store the post content either as raw HTML or as some kind of intermediate markup language like Markdown.

I see..

So I'd create my page layout, get all of my CSS together etc.. Then insert my HTML referencing the CSS into a DB. Then just iterate through each of these order by a CreatedDate Desc so that the newest posts are on top.

Sounds fairly straightforward now that I think about it.. should learn a few bits too

Ciphon · 3 Aug 2010 at 14:24

Just had another thought .. wouldn't storing all of the HTML from the blog posts in a database mean that there is zero SEO? Google's crawlers wouldn't be able to reach the text.. would they?

Edit - Scratch that.. just spoke to a friend of mine in the SEO industry who has told me crawlers can access databases.. so no dilemma! Thanks for your replies