Hello World

Posted: 02/01/2012 @ 15:51

So this attempt 2.0 at keeping a technical blog.

I wasn't happy with my existing blog at xanni.es - it was meant to be a general-topic blog, from code to album reviews - to well, anything.

With Code47 I plan on keeping the scope to my work as a Software Developer - that's the plan anyway!

I didn't keep my previous blog up to date. It was a clunky PHP Behemoth with a WordPress front-end that required updating every 2 weeks. Not meaning to bash PHP or WordPress - but the "update" function accessible via the Control Panel didn't ever work, and I had to mess and faff around with FTP to update everything - when well, I didn't need everything WordPress offered anyway.

It was difficult to customise, and I didn't have as much control over it - not as much as I'd like anyway. I generally found it hard to work with.

So I made my own site - with its own blog!

Everything you see here, from the layout, design and backend was implemented by yours truely - and I'm quite proud of it.

It doesn't even have a database back end - it runs entirely on XML files which are cached in memory when the ASP.NET 4.0 application is first started - and all the articles (which, let's face it, arn't going to be very big in terms of size) are held in memory for the lifetime of the application.

So - in theory - it should serve articles quite quickly. No database connections should also make for an easy deployment.

It's also simple to update - at least for me - nope, there isn't an Administrator 'Control Panel' - I can just alter the XML files as I see fit, then rebuild the 'Article Cache'.

Anyway, I think that's enough for the first introductory article - if you want to know a little more about me and what I do, feel free to check the 'About' page.

I just need to find a suitable ASP.NET host now, and I think I've found one - then I can get this uploaded and out there :)

Tags: misc