Replacing my NBlog with a read-only Angular JS seed over Web API…
I’m going to move away from “powering” this Blog with NBlog. Don’t get me wrong. Chris Fulstow’s NBlog was and is a powerful educational tool for ASP.NET MVC. So when I write about replacing it, it is not because of NBlog in particular. It is because of the CMS-application concept in general.
[Route("Entry/Show/{id}")] public ActionResult RedirectToAngularSeed(string id) { return RedirectPermanent(string.Format("~/#/entry/{0}", id)); }
The CMS can be thought of as a user-super-friendly way to uphold one of the original, Berners-Lee-ist ideals of a read-write Web. So my move can be regarded (poorly) as a failure to celebrate these ideals for the sake of “oversimplification.”
My real-world experience with WordPress has taught me to separate the reading concern from the writing concern in a CMS solution. Further, I am convinced and giddy that the typical CMS design violates the DRY Principle in bulk when we start to treat our Blogging platform(s) “like cattle instead of like pets.”
More than a few pro-level bloggers out there have more than one Blog and (assuming they use a standard CMS) they have to maintain multiple editing interfaces for multiple blogs. I would rather have the option of using one editing interface for multiple Blog sites. The near-insane amount of security patches for WordPress almost always have nothing to do with reading a Blog (which is what most people do to a Blog).
Working with NBlog has taught me that JSON is a first-class Web resource: it represents a document—including an HTML document. So in the near future my Blog will use an Angular JS seed to read JSON documents from Azure Blob storage, using a similar repository pattern featured in NBlog. I will go slightly beyond the version of NBlog I’m using, and add my own JSON-based indexing solution with some primitive taxonomy support (compared to WordPress). This is not a fork of NBlog.
So how will I “publish” to my new Songhay.Blog—and how will the index be updated? Well, my Blog may fall silent (again) for a while but I’ll be sure to, ahem, Blog about this in future.