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In the last days, I've been redesigning and reimplementing the
content-generation architecture of dotnetremoting.cc. The only missing part was
the weblog. I wanted a solution which allows me to easily edit/post from
any location, etc.
Requirements were (in no particular order, all of them were 100%
necessary)
- Server-based solution, necessary for posting while on the road when only
access to a web browser is possible
- Client-application for easy editing. HTML interfaces just don't cut it for
everyday use.
- It's getting tough now: Client and server should be able to synchronize
posts. That is, I might want to write a longer story on my notebook while
offline and at the same time throw a small post directly to the blog
using the server-based HTML interface.
- Client and the server have to be able to store unfinished posts
- Server should be able to accept posts with a predefined future
publication date.
- The client should allow me to easily integrate photos (including automatic
uploading, etc.)
- The whole system should allow me to attach extensible metadata to my posts
- The whole system has to allow me programmatic access to each and every
post
- Client and server should allow easy editing of markup. I want to WYSIWYG
as much as possible
- Keep all URLs to exisiting posts for sake of consistency
- Comments to weblog posts would be nice
I thought about various possible solutions:
- ASPX + Win Forms client.
- Purely XML + XSL based solution
- Customizing existing tools like MT, Radio, ...
- ...
However, all of them had their drawbacks and especially the implementation
effort would be massive (I guess that's also the reason why other .NET bloggers
stopped to work on their own solutions to this problem).
Finally though - it struck like lightning:
Microsoft already has a product which supports all of my
requirements with minimal or no customization effort. I even used to use this
product nearly every day for about five years. Stay tuned ...
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