Update (10/17/2009)

BlogEngine.NET appears to be closer than ever to a Multi-Blog implementation thanks to work done by Jacob Proffitt found here: Multi-blog Obsession.  The SQLBlogProvider allows multiple blogs to be supported by a single SQL Server database.  Imaging the maintenance and resource requirements, compared with “n” blogs and “n” databases, or “n” folders with “n-times-x” xml files for all those posts.  Currently, this provides for a single folder and any number of application instances, all pointing at the same folder.  There may be a few potential answers to this, but only if someone deems it a problem.  I’m now running about 12 (BlogEngine.NET) blogs in a single location with a single database using the SQLBlogProvider.  A few details were worked out to bring this solution up to the 1.5.x version of BlogEngine.NET.  While looking at this, I’ve learned a lot about some new features and found some useful and straightforward applications of Linq to SQL. More...

With all the troubles I’ve had with hosting plans throughout the years, I’ve always wondered how to avoid those same problems for a second time.  Of course, I’d love to avoid them for the first time, so I Google them first.  No, not the problem, but how to avoid problems doing something “odd” with my service.  Let’s say I want to do something really strange like cancel a server or hosting service.  I know, it’s way out there, but please bare with me…I ask the Service Provider what I need to do, after starting with the on-line FAQs, help, forums, etc.  and they say go to this “special” site for canceling service.  OK, it must be “intuitive” or they would have given me more details, right!?  The stand-up comic in me wants to draw this out to its proper conclusion…lots of laughs; but the software developer, architect, infrastructure novice and business owner in me wants to lend a hand.

What Problem was actually resolved?

There are way too many scenarios to list in one sitting, but I can probably link to them from here later, or answer specific questions in comments if I see them.  But my most recent issue was due to the fact that I wanted to upgrade a 1and1.com VPS account to one that was half the price I was paying (for 3 months…and I highly recommend this.)  That wasn’t the deal maker though. More...

DateTime Format for Blog Posts for BlogEngine.NET

...or wherever you want to standardize output formatting.

Here is a rather simple solution to my issue of Date Time formatting on my blog posts.  I noticed that as of a recent version of BlogEngine.NET, the Date looked something like this: "29. June 2008 09:00"  I wanted to change it to something more readable to my target readers, some very local, such as: "Sunday, June 29, 2008 09:00 AM".  Well, I might want to change it sometime, AND I would like to drop it into multiple Themes, so I decided to place the format in Web.Config AppSettings. I looked up my specific Format and added an appSetting.  Then I just replaced the code used in "PostView.ascx" and tested away.

Here's what you can do to implement this yourself.

1. Go to .NET Framework Developer's Guide, Custom Date and Time Format Strings and/or locate your format string.
   • I used "dddd, MMMM dd, yyyy hh:mm tt"
2. Create an appSettings key such as: Custom.DateFormat and assign your format to the value.
   • <add key="Custom.DateFormat" value="dddd, MMMM dd, yyyy hh:mm tt" />
3. Now add the code to use the format string.
   • <%=Post.DateCreated.ToString(ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings["Custom.DateFormat"])%>
   • original: <%=Post.DateCreated.ToString("d. MMMM yyyy HH:mm") %>

 More...

A simple way to adjust or tweak a theme to your liking can be as simple as a few lines of css code in styles.css.  I made a couple very minor changes to achieve the affect of a new background color, content on the right when it was always on the left, and a font color change to go along with the background better.  This is what it looked like:

/* I replace the Standard body formatting:
body {
    background-color: #F1F1F1;
    color: #444444;
    font-family: Verdana;
    font-size: 11px;
    margin: 0 auto;
    width: 980px;
    position: relative;
}*/

/* With the following: */
body {
    background-color: #6699FF;
    color: #444444;
    font-family: Verdana;
    font-size: 11px;
    margin: 0 auto;
    width: 980px;
    position: relative;
}

 More...

It's already mid-August and I just finished a round of BlogEngine.NET updates to take advantage of the new features in 1.4.5.x.  For a lot of folks, the need to Blog is what makes this platform so valuable.  But my clients, and my own interests also include adding Extensions and Advertising.  Now that there's  a Text box Widget, I can add simple ads like an Amazon link, Google AdSense, and affiliate links right in the Widget Zone without any special code.  Maybe this can be improved to target this medium, but I have to admit, if it works, I'm going to use it as is.  But there are a few things I'd like to see sooner than later.

Multiple Blog Support

What if I had 15 Blogs on different topics and some of them included overlapping authors?  I would like to support this configuration with One code base, One server or service layer, connecting to a Single SQL database or SQL Server farm.  I know I'd want this because I want it now and I have 8 Blogs, with 8 Web Apps, 4 AppPools, and 8 sets of XML Data.

SQL Server Express wouldn't cut it since my server started running into resource issues.  Not because of SQL Server but because I need 8 databases the way this configuration is setup.  Even if I upgrade my server (or hosting platform) to allow for more capacity, it doesn't scale.  Also, I will spend more time maintaining Blogs than writing for them.  So more Blogs = Less Blogging.  That's not a positive goal for me.  More...

I'd really like to see some more BlogEngine.NET themes take advantage of the new WidgetZone and cool features of version 1.4.  To that end, I wanted to see how difficult it would be to do this myself.  As a .NET architect and developer I haven't found myself doing a lot of css and UI interface work recently, but figured if I can do BizTalk, SharePoint, EntLib, SQL, WinForms and even ASP.NET development, HTML and css might be possible.  Besides, I'm only adding on to what other artists and geniuses have already done.

Here is my first attempt at modifying an existing BLogEngine.NET 1.3 theme to handle 1.4 functionality.  I went after one of my favorites: MWRT-002.

This is my update for BlogEngine.NET 1.4: MWRT-002-14.zip (23.24 kb)

Please critique, and let me know if you made any improvements that I had missed.  I'll be working on a few really nice themes from various locations over the next several weeks including one I'll be using on this site.  I'll try to show an example site soon.

I'll document some of the work done here to help others.  I'm using VM ware Workstation 6.0.2, running a Windows 2003 R2 SP2 domain controller I built last night for some future development.  Since there are no major add-ons and SQL Server is yet to be configured, I'll be using pretty much using default configuration.