Return of the Blog
It has been over a year and a half since I last blogged. Most of my interaction during this time has been through Twitter, Friendfeed and to a much lesser extent Facebook. About a year back I started experimenting with Microsoft Azure (then in early beta). That experiment never came to fruition taking a toll on my blogging endeavors. My original plan was to migrate this website from running on my local computer to Azure, but technical issues and lack of focus left the blogging code in a limbo because of which I never finished migrating the entire code. Being online on Twitter and Friendfeed also lowered the urgency. This may now make sense to some of you who have seen a blank home page. I will write more about the Azure experience in a future post.
Fast forward to two days back, I decided this website needs a major overhaul given that Microsoft Azure didn’t work for me. It is for small businesses that do not want to spend time, money and IT resources into building their own server rack. My goal was to spend as little money as possible and yet have the ability to play with the latest web technologies with little to no underlying complexity. After doing some basic research, I decided to go with Go Daddy's hosting service. It’s cheap, it has IIS7 with ASP.NET 3.5 and it gave me the ability to create a SQL Server database (2GB maximum size). My past experience with Go Daddy’s SQL Server wasn't very good so I dumped the idea, you can read more about it in my previous post “Migrating to Godaddy.com”.
As of now my blog is running happily on Go Daddy servers and I don't have to keep my machine running all the time. I spent the last weekend rewriting the blog engine in ASP.NET MVC and cleaning up the interface. It was one of the most productive weekends ever. I got my feet wet in ASP.NET MVC, I put on a designer hat and changed the blog theme, and I got my website up and running. Go Daddy had the option to connect to their SQL Server using SQL Server Management Studio. I didn’t have to use their web based interface any more. The entire backend migration was very easy.
There is still work to be done. One of the ideas I have is to import around 700+ tweets from my twitter account and display it on my blog. I am not sure of this yet. The other idea is to display a Flickr stream of my recent favorites using the Flickr API, an idea I got from Friendfeed. That may be a project for next weekend.