Code for My Blog is On Github

Friday, December 11, 2009 -

Was trying for something a bit more “flowery” and exciting with that title but… well whatever. A few months ago I mentioned that people should build their own blog as a way to keep their skills sharp with new things. More often then not we only know what we do at work, and let our skills lapse. Not the best idea in this economy :).

I realize, though, that not everyone wants to start from scratch so I’m sharing what I’ve built – but I’ve turned it into a “template” if you will. A place for you to get started.

Basic Technical Layout

I built the thing using ASP.NET MVC 1.0 and SubSonic 3.0, with a SQL Server 2005 database. When you open the thing up it will want to see a database called “blog” somewhere – I didn’t use a User Instance (meaning I didn’t stick it in App_Data) – instead I put the scripts in the /DBScripts folder. You can see all of these instructions on the main page:

Note – you can’t see this page until you install the DB…

It’s a Bit Messy In There

I’ll clean it up over time – it’s not too bad, but then again this isn’t about me doing stuff for you – I’m just giving away the mess that I’ve been playing with :) and I think there’s some good stuff in there. Particularly, I wish I had more time to work on the CSS. I’ve received a lot of feedback on the markup etc and I wish I could address it but I just don’t have time at the moment.

If you want to “mess” around with the mess and push some CSS changes – well that would be groovy of you.

The Code

The repository is here at Github. You can download it or, better yet, “fork” it into your own repository should you decided you want to share what you do. This isn’t supposed to be my attempt at an Open Source blog system – it’s just me sharing stuff I’ve worked on – I have no aspirations to topple WordPress. I’ll leave that to Oxite :).