Site Refresh

by Bryan on 12/13/2016 at 7:45 AM in Site Information

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I was overhauling the site—in case you’re only reading this via the RSS feed, the overhaul is here! The most obvious change is the look, but the changes go much deeper. In fact, aside from the underlying data store, the entire site has been rewritten, along with a technology refresh.

For those of you interested in the details, the site is running ASP.NET MVC 5 and Web API 2 on .NET 4.6.2. Since I’m a developer, not a designer, I leveraged the very popular Bootstrap framework for a little help with the UI, along with a theme from Bootswatch for a slight variation on the out-of-the-box Bootstrap look and feel. Additionally, I’m utilizing Font Awesome in a couple of places. Of course there’s the actual code that makes it all go, which is C#, and my own custom blog/CMS engine, which has its roots in the blog software I wrote 13 years ago, and utilizes a couple of open source projects, including a slightly modified MvcSiteMapProvider, and Ninject. I've also replaced my own comment engine with Disqus.

With this update, it’s my hope that everything available on the old site is available on the new site. There is one exception to this, and that is any Url that includes a blog post id, rather than a blog post title, will not work. Several years ago, when I went away from using the blog post id to look up posts, I kept that functionality around to avoid any broken links—as of right now, those links are broken, though I don’t know how many still exist. I plan on providing a fix, involving a permanent redirect, but it’s not in place yet.

If you have any questions, or notice anything out of place, please let me know!