Learn MS .NET

Jesse Foster of GravityCube has released a new extension for BlogEngine.net. This extension is designed to overlay images on the current page. The emphasis for this extension is to allow continuous flowing of content without sending the user to a blank page. 

By displaying the image on top of the existing content by simply clicking the image to display and then clicking it again it eliminates the need to click the back button and distract the user from leaving your site or closing out the window expecting to be back at the page.

Jesse based his work for the extension on the following JS script which can be found at http://huddletogether.com/

This extension will definitely be used in my version of BlogEngine.net.

For everyone that has started to work with Blogengine.net and wants to implement the DotNetKicks extension that would be comparable to the DiggIt extension.  There is a new extension that is available at the Flawless Code blog.

This extension places the kick it button on the post with the number of times that the article has been kicked.

The extension can be downloaded here.

For those people who are using BlogEngine.net and would like to have the ability to encrypt their web.config file and decrypt it easily.  Chris Blankenship has written an excellent add-in for us that allows us to do just that.  You can read his post about the modification Encrypt Web.Config Extension for BlogEngine.Net.

Basically the modification needs two files added to the admin section of the site and a simple modification of the web.sitemap file to add the files to the admin section of BlogEngine.  I think it's a great feature for use when your hosting your web site on a hosting service and would like to keep all your passwords kept secret.

Having played with several blogging engines over the last few years and having experience in .NET programming since 2000.  I decided to take a look at BlogEngine.net.  I've previously worked with blogs based on .Text, dasBlog and Community Server and they all were interesting and worked well. I was just not crazy about the upgrading of some of these other engines.

Plus as a developer I always like to get under the covers of what is going on in the code to get a good understanding of what the software is doing. Well while browsing http://www.asp.net/ and taking a look at the starter kits, I saw the BlogEngine.net project there.  I proceeded to take a look at the project site for the starter kit and then took a look at the project site on CodePlex.  I then decided to give it a try.

A few years ago I had started work on creating a community site here at Learn MS NET and it didn't pan out quite like I wanted so I had basically mothballed the domain.  I had also been playing around with blog engines at a URL for my business http://blog.shancer.com/ which I had written a few articles for.  So I made the decision in early December to combine both my mothballed site's content which only had a few articles of interest and relevance and the blog posts from my business blog.

Which has led me to using BlogEngine.net and currently working with the latest build from last night at this point.  I ported all my content from dasBlog which was the blogging engine I was using with BlogML.  It took some playing around to get it complete but it worked fantastically for pulling that content in.  I then took and renamed my old community web site and proceeded to copy all the articles out and place on this new site.

Now that i'm becoming familiar with how the source works for BlogEngine.net I will be developing some extensions and helping improve some of the extensions that are already available.  Look for more on this in the future.