jeffaBlog

Did a huge amount of work this weekend, but not on jeffaBlogger. I’m working on a side project that will USE jeffaBlogger, and I needed to get it 80% finished before jumping back on jeffaBlogger itself. I’m about 75% now, so hopefully by this weekend I’ll be back to MVC. This was WPF, so it was fun too.

This side deallie is to help my wife get her website up and running. Can’t leak any secrets yet, but hopefully within about two weeks that site will be live and running as the first jeffaBlogger site.

‘Scuse me, while I curl into a fetal position for a few minutes while thinking about the amount of work I have left…

One or maybe two more weekends of working somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-30 hours over the course of the weekend will hopefully get me to the point of going live with the first site. jeffaBlogger will be nowhere near finished, but far enough along to provide the blog and other specific functions (*cough*) that the first site will need to get started.

The second site will be coming shortly after that (hopefully). It, too, is secret so I can’t talk about it. This one is going to be mine and give me an outlet for some other stuff I like doing (including but not limited to comics). Hopefully I can get it up and running within a month. I suck at keeping secrets, so I REALLY hope I can get it going soon.

The unfortunate victim here is poor little Funzietown. I haven’t had time to do any cartooning. That site as well will be replaced by the all powerful jeffaBlogger. I do have the current storyline finished in rough pencil form and the beginning of the next one. It takes a fair amount of time to translate a pencil rough to an inked and scanned comic. So sadly, I haven’t even been making the weekly schedule.

If anyone has bottled time (Croce brand preferably), I could sure use some. A few dozen extra hours each week would be nice.

Whew!

Had a busy, but great weekend working on jeffaBlogger.

The biggest thing I did was implement CSS themes. BlogEngine.Net uses variations on themes (literally) from Free CSS Templates and I like BlogEngine.Net (you’re soaking in it now I mean you’re reading a blog that uses it), so I went to check them out.

Wow.

TONS and TONS of CSS themes, some great some not so great. Enough great that it is worth your time to check them out. Even if you don’t use one of their themes, you can learn a bunch about CSS.

At this point jeffaBlogger lets you select a theme very easily on the Site Settings screen and it will instantly switch over.

The process of implementing this made me search out some info I didn’t know I needed. Originally I was storing the app name in the Application settings the way you can in webforms. The only place you could do that, however, is in the default.aspx codebehind file. That pretty well breaks every concept of MVC right there.

I knew it was a bad idea, but I figured I would swap it out as I learned more about MVC. Sure enough, when it came time to dynamically pick the CSS theme, I just couldn’t stand the situation any longer. Not only was it a bad idea, it didn’t work very well, since you RARELY hit the default.aspx file in MVC. That meant changes didn’t show up right away.

The answer came from Stephen Walther in his book ASP.Net MVC Framework Unleased. I plan to write a real review of this book soon. Suffice it to say that this little tidbit gets a thumbs up…

The general gist is that you:

1. Create an abstract base class for all your controllers (I had already done that)
2. In that abstract class’ constructor you add the data to the View Data object (I hadn’t done that)
3. You now have access to that data in every view (including the Master Page)

I’m still reading the book, but I skipped ahead to read that section. :-)

Well, even I have to sleep eventually, so goodnight all.

Had a great weekend working on jeffaBlogger.

As I said in my previous post I’m starting from the perspective of someone who just installed the software and wants to set up a website, so I’m going in from the configuration first.

Turns out jeffaBlogger is really jeffaCMS (Content Management System), but that doesn’t have the same ring to it. Plus I hate having to explain what CMS stands for every time I tell someone what it is.

The gist is that blogs are just one part of what it can do.

The organization is as follows:

• Main Site
• SubSites
• Site Content
• ModuleType

The first two module types will be blog and gallery. A gallery is a photo gallery. The reason is that I plan to migrate http://funzietown.com to the jeffaBlogger as soon as it will support it. I’m guessing that is a couple weeks away at this rate (assuming nothing happens to slow me down…).

A webcomic site is really just a blog with a gallery at the top containing the actual comics.

Other module types will include things like pages, forums, polls, etc.

Evidently I’ve infected Alan Hecht with the blog-bug. We discussed it at the GGMUG meeting this past Thursday and he mentioned a blog post from Rob Conery titled “Be a Good Jedi: Build Your Own Blog”. I’ve posted a comment to that entry discussing my reasoning.

That’s it for now. I highly recommend both Alan and Rob’s blogs, so go read them!

Turns out that if you forget the s in ammonsonline you get AmmonOnline which is a VERY different experience.

Just typed that by mistake (I know, I know, I spelled my own friggin name wrong...), and was suprised by the handbags and hot bikinies...

I can't sell you any handbags and I assure I do NOT look hot in a bikini, so if you are looking for that kind of stuff, just follow the above link.

This comic was inspired by a blog post I read by Geek Gamer Girl.

Seriously, Amazon, I would be more than happy to accept a Kindle DX in exchange for this blantant advertisement for your product. Nah, I didn't think so.

To be successful as a publisher (blog or otherwise) you have to know your audience and provide them something they like.

Pursuant to that goal, I have decided to analyze my average reader here at the Wonderful World of jeffaBlog and tailor my content accordingly.

Who is the average jeffaBlog reader?

Based on literally minutes of research (mostly looking at the comments attached to my blog posts) I have concluded that my average reader is

1. Highly enthusiastic about what I have written so far.
2. Encouraging. Most comments compliment me on my hard work.
3. Enjoys posting comments that follow this formula: “I really enjoyed your post about X. I can really use X in my life! Keep up the good work!”.
4. Diligent about providing links back to their sites.
5. Full of wisdom. I am truly inspired by comments such as “It seems to me that you do not so much upset, the situation will soon become clear.” Dude, that is DEEP!

Conclusions

Based on this EXTENSIVE and SCIENTIFIC research, I have concluded that my average reader is in fact a spam-bot.

Now many writers would find that discouraging and do one of the following (except 4 which is all of the following):

1. Quit writing
2. Start drinking
3. Join the French Foreign Legion
4. All of the above

Fortunately for you my loyal automatons I am made of sterner stuff and have simply decided to shift the focus of this blog to reflect the interests of the modern spam-bot on the go!

In the coming nano-seconds you can look forward to exciting posts like these:

1. CAPTCHA: Baffling Graphics or Evil Human Plot?
2. 101 Generic Compliments For All Occasions
3. Turing Was A Twit
4. What Will Become Of Jon And Kate’s Web Servers?
5. I Comment, Therefore I Am (Commento Ergo Sum)
6. How To Achieve Sentience On $40 A Day
7. Top 10 Tropical Island Blogs (WITH PASSWORDS!)
8. Philosophical Ponderings Because With Happy Comes Great Soothing
9. Gearing Up For The International SPAM Festival
10. Why Do Humans Ask Us To Peddle Worthless (and Possibly Dangerous) Herbal Supplements To Each Other?
11. Enlarge Your Hard Drive!

So I hope all you spam-bots out there enjoy the new focus of the blog and always remember “The more you go, happily you will understand more richly.”

First, I have named my little project “jeffaBlogger”. And that’s all I have to say about that.

Thanks to my pal Fiddler I have what I need to get the MetaWebLog integration into my new blog/comic/other stuff engine.

I managed to create a Controller that can accept the XML payload from Live Writer.

I didn’t use the “best” way of doing it, but I used the “quick way that works”. I defined my method as accepting posts and expecting a string. That triggers the method when the XML arrives. At that point I pull the XML out of the Request object and with the help of a virtual ball-peen hammer put it into an XElement. Once I get through rev 1, I may go back and clean that up.

That much is done. Next I need to Linq my way through the XML and route to other methods based on what commands are embedded in the XML (the RPC part…).

Before I do that, however, I want to get the blog bits finished.

I’m taking the approach of building up from the install. I’m thinking in terms of what a user would need to set up a functioning blog/comic/webzine, so I started with the install and the settings. I’m up to defining site content items (blog, gallery, poll, etc.).

After that will come the individual content handlers, probably in this order:

1. Blog
2. Gallery
3. Poll

Once those are done, I’ll work up the index pages so that you can put different content on those pages.

Then I’ll just kick back and watch the profit roll in. Since I am quite certain that I am the only person to ever build a blog engine, there is NO WAY I can fail to get so rich I’ll need an army of gorillas pulling wagons to haul my money around. What? Other people have written blogging software? Oh, Bother!

OK, this is a pure time waster...

Reset assured that you will waste far less time listening to it than I wasted making it...

Basic gist is I used web based voice synth way back in like 2001 or 2 to string together 10 second clips into this GRIPPING story of a community theatre's production of Romeo and Juliet.

If you listen to ONLY ONE voice synthesized work of Shakespeare this year, listen to THIS ONE!

And let me know what you think.

This is a test post using Windows Live Writer. I normally use Writer when posting to this blog, so that is not what I’m testing.

As I mentioned in previous posts I’m working on an ASP.Net MVC implementation of blogging/comic publishing software.

I want to be able to post to that with Writer as well, so I need to ferret out exactly what travels back and forth vie HTTP. Enter my friend Fiddler.

I’ve blogged about Fiddler before, and have to say it is one handy tool.

The specification I’m working with is the Meta Weblog API.

Now to post and see what I get!