I know what you’re thinking, “Three posts in one day? This can’t be the same blog I’ve been following for the last month or so. What is wrong with my RSS reader?” As far as I know there is nothing wrong with your RSS reader. This is my third post today.
My recent lack of regular blog posts and my sadly unnoticed disappearance from Twitter and the rest of the microblogging universe can simply be explained by the following:
The first couple of items are nothing worth writing about. The third item has caused me to create a couple of blog posts about LINQ and ASP.NET MVC. I covered the new job in my previous post. What I really want to tell you about is my newest site, ASPDotNetMVC.com, which I believe Keith Elder called “YADHS” - Yet Another Dan Hounshell Site.
Mike Eaton beat me to the punch and attributed the site to me early last week, but let me catch you up anyway. I won’t go into too much detail about the why’s and how’s here because I think I did a pretty good job of covering the why on the About page of the site itself. Briefly, I started diving into ASP.NET MVC and found lots of information (great blog posts, articles, lots of stuff on Twitter, etc) but no one place served as the hub for all that information. There was no official Microsoft site, like with Silverlight.net, to serve as a starting point and launch point. I said to myself that there should be a portal for everything ASP.NET MVC, asked myself why I shouldn’t be the one to build it, decided to take the plunge, found a good domain name and went about doing that voodoo that I do.
The site is really pretty simple, it’s just made up of a bunch of little pieces that do just the one thing and do it well. And each of the little pieces work pretty well together. I was explaining how simple it was to Mike last week and when I finished he said, “Wow, that sounds awesome… I don’t know how to do any of those things. You should make this an open source application.” I’m not sure that I’m quite ready to do that just yet because I have plans for a similar site on a similar topic. But there are a couple of pieces that I do plan on sharing - one of them being a very simple Pingback library.
On the plus side for me the site basically runs itself. Now that I have all of the basic parts in place and I’ve finished all the features planned for Iteration 1* (and some of Iteration 2) it doesn’t require much day-to-day from me. There are some other things that I’d like to add to the site over time, as I have time, to build in more “Community”. One of those is building voting for blog posts, articles, etc, that are listed on the site by integrating with Kigg, an open source MVC starter kit application on CodePlex. I’m about 60% finished with this, I just need to add some final touches and some polish. Additionally I’d like to definitely add forums (not much of a surprise there, huh? :) ) and then depending on how that goes taking a look at adding blogs and other Community Server community features.
* Side Note - RE: Iteration #1 - I treated this as a real project with a lot of help from Unfuddle, which I discovered a couple of months ago based on the recommendation from a buddy to look into it for free SVN hosting. Unfuddle can do that and oh so much more. More posts on Unfuddle are queued up in Windows Live Writer and should be coming soon.