Re-Architecture of DylanBright.com

Welcome to the 21st century!  Today I implemented a change to the website that I have been thinking about for a while.  DylanBright.com was probably the second ASP.NET thing I ever made, and it shows.   The code has always been ugly and it has always been powered by an Access database on the back end.  Now I'm not ragging on Access here, Access works fine for stuff like this.  Since I get one or two hits a year besides the search robots and me checking the page, it is not like dylanbright.com has to scale.

I never came up with a good mechanism for updating the "blog" portion.  I tried making an admin page with free text box html editor controls, but I never settled on something that I liked.  I also started looking at the blog applications on the net, like blogger and WordPress, and it became painfully apparent that dylanbright.com had fallen way behind the times when it came to content management features.  Standards were invented and came into popular use too, none of which I was using.  I added my own RSS functionality a while back, but it wasn't totally compliant with Atom, or anything similar.  It was kind of my own thing. 

Despite the superiority of the publicly available products, I didn't  want to just migrate to one of them.  They have a certain sameness to them, with their standardized themes and what not, and I felt like I would be losing my individuality.  I was also uncomfortable with relinquishing so much control to a big soulless company like Google or Microsoft. 

I came up with a hybrid approach, something that would give me the best of both worlds.  I would use one of the freely available blog services and then instead of pulling my data from my Access database, I would just pull the data from the RSS feed that the commercial product provided.  I would also backup the XML file from the free service, so I would always have the data in case I wanted to migrate it to something else.

I sat on that idea for about two years.  I started to try it a couple times, but I would lose interest and go on to something else.  Well today I sat down with the laptop to have another go at it.  I mostly do powershell scripts at work these days, and I hadn't done much ASP.NET wise in a long time, so I thought it would be challenging.  Then I found System.ServiceModel.Syndication which includes the Atom10FeedFormatter class.  Maybe this is new in .NET 3.0.  It made it very easy to implement my idea.

So there we have it.  There are other things I want to do to sort of flush things out, but the basic functionality is working (if you are reading this, anyway).  Of course this has no impact on appearance or features for you the end use, but now you can visit dylanbright.com secure in the knowledge that it is slightly less antiquated under the hood.