Thoughts on the Science of Computing

Anyone who has a blog should register it with Technorati. To do this however you have to add a link like the above to your site. Technocrati is the google of the blogsphere, with so many blogs registered on their site.

I have finally migrated my site over to the YABE Blogging Engine.  This is a blogging engine I am writing in my spare time, of which I have very little.  I have also been assisted on this project by Volkan Uzun and Adnan Masood. 

Why do we need another blogging engine?  Well, we probably don't but I didn't think there was a very good asp.net blogging engine when I started this.  Wordpress is great and I have seen some cool stuff in rails and django, but there appeared to be a gaping hole in the asp.net world, although Das Blog is decent.

Asp.net MVC seemed to be the perfect platform to build something better.  In addition, I thought it would be educational as I have to use these technologies at my work.

I was hoping to get more collaborators as my time was limited with my graduate studies and work, and as I found that writing a fully featured blogging engine is quite a bit of work.  So instead, I have a barebones blogging engine with just a few basic features.

At this point, I am happy to just release this blog on the engine.  I have learned a lot about asp.net MVC in the process and Linq-to-Sql.  A lot of the code is still hacky especially in the views and handling of URL's etc.  I also learned a bit about CSS and html and who much there really is to know here.

Anyways, I am happy to get off commuity server and finally have my blog running on YABE, sans comments.

Time permitting I will add a few more basic features with comments being the highest priority.

Just wanted to let people know that comment support is now added for YABE.

The comments work as follows

1. They will require a name, email address, a comment, and optionally a url.
2. Every comment is then sent to the akismet service to see if it is spam or not.
3. There is an option to require approval of comments or not.

The source is checked in and I am now working on bundling another release, which will probably be YABE 1.0.

It will include the following

1. A master script to create the entire database structure
2. A script to add dummy data to tables for easier previewing of what a blog will look like
3. A readme file with instructions on the various configuration points such as the blog title, etc. 

 There will still be quite a few missing features such as paging, which is a must and an expanded admin console to support management of comments, links, blog roll, etc.