Introduction
This tutorial describes a way to use Microsoft ASP.Net as a
front-end to a weblog authored with
Blogger
or
Blogger Pro. It is the .NET counterpart of the guidelines provided in the excellent tutorial
"How to manage your site with Blogger, XML and ASP" (Part 1, 2 and 3), but will show you the power of .NET by including some advanced options like the use of comments with your posts.
Blogger is a web-based Content Management System for Weblogs. It has more than 1.000.000 users. A free variant of their CMS is available as well as a paid variant
which includes more advanced features like RSS and Post-by-mail.
End users use a form on the Internet to enter content which is at-the-other-end ftp'ed to their webservers. The content is archived and ordered by date and time.
Microsoft ASP.NET is the successor to ASP. .NET consists of the Common Language Runtime which enables programs written in any .NET enabled
language to run on any platform supporting the CLR. The other component is the .NET Framework which is a large set of classes. ASP.NET has many differences as compared to classic ASP. Apart from
language differences ( any .Net Language (C#,VB.NET vs VB Script ), no more COM, it is fully Object Oriented, compiled and you get access to the full 3400+ classes in the .NET Framework
which enables webdevelopers to do almost everything on their website which they can dream of out-of-the-box.
more...
A weblog is a collection of content items mostly grouped by date and time. The content can consist of links to interesting websites, news, personal life stories, photo's, drawings and so
on. A weblog consists of the main up-to-date content part which is variable each time the weblog is updated and an archive in which the items are stored e.g. by month and year. Each content item
can consist of the content itself, a title, a date and time, an author, a link to the more permanent archive location, a link to comments submitted by visitors on the item and much more.
Multiple weblogs can consist on one webpage. E.g. a small so-called 'linklog' on the left side (with some nice weblinks) and a larger weblog in the middle.
About the Author
Drs.ing. Edward de Leau is a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer and has been working in the IT sector for over 10 years. He maintains a personal weblog since 1999 using Blogger and Blogger Pro.
Currently he is working as a consultant for IBM Business Consultancy Services in the Netherlands.
Preparation
First of all, let's be carefull what we are going to do. Let's first make a backup of our
original settings so we can always switch back ( in case an airplane crashes in the middle of
you reading this tutorial and you HAVE to urge to post !). Please, please do the following first :
-
write down the settings of the directory and filenames you use under "settings"
(Blogger menu)
-
copy and paste your old template in notepad and save it
-
put you arms next to your body and stretch your fingers
If you have done this, we will now, for safety reasons, change the path which you use for
your postings and archives. If anything is going to fail you will never overwrite anything
that's already there and you can easily switch back, and go on like you used to do.
There are 4 items we wil change :
-
Your Weblog Server Path
-
Your Weblog Filename
-
Your Weblog Archive Path
-
Your Weblog Archive Filename
I will give you suggestions for the paths and filenames. If you follow my suggestions you
will find these same paths and filenames in the rest of the story. If you don't follow my
suggestions you will burn in hell forever but you probably know what you are doing...
Here...are the suggestions :
-
Weblog Server Path : "weblogparts/weblog/current"
-
Weblog Filename : "currentweblog.xml"
-
Weblog Archive Path : "weblogparts/weblog/archiveweblog.xml"
-
Weblog Archive Filename : "weblogparts/weblog/archives"
Also put your archives to be published "monthly", this is very important ! I'm sorry if your
old archives were weekly but i will come back to that in the Archive Control part.
This concludes the votes from holland the settings you should change in
your Blogger Control Panel. Note we changed the filenames to one with the extension ".xml".
Why would that be ? That's because we are going to use XML !
(you can click the second tab now)
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