This weekend I have published my new blog. Before my blog was hosted by Tumblr, but as a true programmer I needed to write my own. I have focused on making the blog as feature-free as possible. I have no admin interface, I just use Windows Live Writer. For comments I use Disqus.
The blog is running on my own virutal server hosted by ISPHuset ( in Norway). Having my own web server with the flexibility it brings is great.
The reason for writing a new blog framework is learning. At work you are confined to work with the tools that get the job done. When writing your own software you can experiment.
I decided to try out Autofac for dependency injection, Db4o as a storage and Moq as mocking framework. Usually I would use Structuremap, NHibernate and RhinoMocks.
Autofac
Autofac is ok. It has all the features that I usually use in StrutureMap. The only problem with Autofac is the documentation. Going from version 1 to 2 Autofac has changed its entire API and its conventions. Googeling for help is not easy, as you never know if what your read is version 1 or 2. Documentation is a problem with most OS projects and there should be a better way. I have been playing with the thought of creating a web site that can deal with this issue. All in all, I give Autofac a 4/6 ;)
Db40
I have not worked a lot with Document or Object databases before, so working with Db4o was interesting.
Getting started is very easy:
_db = Db4oEmbedded.OpenFile(Db4oEmbedded.NewConfiguration(), fileName); _db.Store(myObject);
That’s all you have to do as long as you have a reference to the Db4o dll. Easy schmeasy. I did run into some problems. Consider having a Post object with a list of Tags. So you insert all your posts into the Db and now you want a list of all tags without pulling out every single post in the database. Suddenly you realize you are not dealing with a relational database anymore.
Luckily Db4o has Linq support, so you can query your object without pulling them out of the database. In my case I created a Tag object and asked the database for a unique list of Tags. I’m no master of Db4o so the solution I found might not be the best one.
Using Db4o is very easy in the simple cases, but things easily gets tricky when dealing with relationships. For me to use Db4o effectivly in the future I need to learn more about it, and frankly, I don’t think I want to spend the time. I have more faith in document databases, so maybe I will try out Mongo next time.
Moq
I did’t get to use Moc a whole lot. My first impression is that Moq has a much cleaner interface compared to Rhino Mocks. I think I will be using Moq in the future.
Continous deployment is great
The smartest thing I have done is to set up a TeamCity server at home. Everytime I check my code into GitHub, TeamCity get’s my changes and deploys them automatically to the Blog. Continous deployment should be mandatory for everybody developing software. Now, you don’t nessecarily need to deploy the changes directly to your customer, but at least you should do in-house deployment. Every single repetitive development task that can be automated should be. The reason ? It saves money and makes programming more fun !
Problems and bugs
Most of the challenges I faced when developing the blog was related to porting the data from the previous blog. I needed to support the Tumblr url schema /Post/[PostId]/[Slug], and also my new one /Post/[Slug]. Also I needed to move my images and make sure that the comment integration continued working.
Making sure that all the RSS feeds continued working was also a challange. Some of you might have noticed that I suddenly released over 30 posts in Google reader. Not sure how I would prevent that behaviour. Hope it didn’t cause any problems.
Bjarte – the designer
I’m not really a web designer, but I have done some design work in the past. I focused on making the reading experience nice and I hope I have done a good job. When It comes to the rest of the design I am pretty happy with it considering the fact that I’m a developer :) I know the design is different between IE and Chrome b.c. I have deliberately used some CSS 3 features that is not supported everywhere. Also the site doesn’t look good on 1024*800 monitors, and monitors with low contrast. Can’t please them all :)
I have tried to make the HTML as clean as possible by relying on CSS to do most of the work, and letting the HTML be responsible for structure only. In the future I might spice up the site with some nifty JQuery action, but right now I’m content with maintaining a small feature set.
That’s it for now. See you later :)
