Ten years ago on this day I launched this personal website which is definitely not a blog. It was just a side project to learn LINQ and the new features of ASP.NET 3.5. Who would have thought it would last for 10 years? My noobier self was quite proud of what I had written and of course with time I became ashamed. Right now I'd rather rewrite the project than develop new functionality on top of the current codebase and no, that has nothing to do with it being Web Forms.

   I learned a lot of things from this project. Although after learning LINQ I did not meet any programming challenges it turns out a real-world project has a lot of requirements one normally does not think of. A favorite example is avoiding double post when the user has just posted a comment and presses F5. A real world project has a lot of small issues like this one that tend to be overlooked when learning. When I built this project I was already working as a professional programmer but I still had people to look after me and tell me about all the small things I had missed. Being forced to think of them myself taught me what managing a software project felt like. I fought spam and had to implement ways to block it quickly. I had to change the defaults of some features because they turned out to be terrible user experience for the main user - myself. In addition I implemented some "clever" solutions for simple things just to learn why they are not that clever and why big boys do it differently.

   Here are some stats:

   Total Posts: 268 (about 1 article every 2 weeks on average)
   Posts in Bulgarian: 127
   Posts in English: 141
   Posts about music: 71
   Posts about programming: 64
   Posts about games: 36
   Posts about technology: 41
   Comments: 1645

   Our fearless team has just released a new version of the Personal Webpage Engine that powers this No-blog. This version includes several small bugfixes. This will be the last version before version 2.0 comes with many majestic features. Well... unless everything suddenly breaks and we are forced to release another bugfix version.

   As always the code is available at Codeplex. If you want to experience the glory of being part of the team you can contribute there.

    Our team has just released the newest version of the Personal Website Engine - 1.2.1. In this version we have replaced the TinyMCE editor with the AJAX Control Toolkit editor. This one is a bit of a downgrade because TinyMCE has more features. However the AJAX Control Toolkit editor has better integration with ASP.NET and seems to be a bit faster and more stable. What is more we can make use of more controls from the toolkit in the future.

    We have also refactored the admin interface that had a lot of duplicate code between the add and edit functionality. Now they share a common control.

    Here is the new look of the admin part:



    As always you can download the source code and contribute from the project page at Codeplex. Please report any bugs you may encouter although we are incapable of writing buggy code so this would mean someone has sabotaged us.

    It was high time for our team to introduce a new set of features. Like half of the Web users visit this website so optimizing the experience is really important. The first feature we have added is the OR-based tag search. I think it is pretty self-explanatory what it does. It also works with the RSS feed if you craft the URL using '|' as the separator symbol for OR and '+' as the separator symbol for AND. For example subscribing for:

http://sietch.net/Rss.aspx?Tag=programming+english

Yields a feed of all posts that are in English AND are about programming. Subscribing for:

http://sietch.net/Rss.aspx?Tag=music|movies

Will produce a feed of all posts that are about music OR movies.

    The second addition is the Web Slice for the latest comments. Web Slices are something like a visual RSS feed that is refreshed automatically. If you are using Internet Explorer 8 you can subscribe to it. Alternatively if you are using the minority browser Firefox you can use the WebChunks ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8494 ) addon to subscribe. Rumor has it that Opera 10 will support Web Slices out of the box. If you are using other minority browser I just do not know what you can do and how you are going to live without this invaluable feature. I guess you will have to keep refreshing the page manually every 15 minutes. Here is what the Web Slice looks like:

    We also fixed a bug related to duplicate items in feeds in some readers like Google Reader. This particular fix was deployed some time ago so people who are subscribed via Google Reader should have had no duplicates for the last items.

    As always you can download the source code and even get involved in the development on Codeplex - http://blognet.codeplex.com/

   Our small but evergrowing team has released a new version of the Personal Webpage Engine that powers this No-blog. The new version allows searching by multiple tags, issues a warning if someone posted a comment while the user was writing one and provides more meaningful logging. You can also subscribe to RSS feed by multiple tags but you will have to craft the URL yourself. For example if you want to subscribe to articles about music which are in Bulgarian you need the following URL http://sietch.net/Rss.aspx?Tag=bulgarian+music. OR-based search will probably come in the next version.

   I have also moved the site to a new hosting package. This one runs on Windows Server 2008, IIS7 and SQL Server 2008. Migrations are always fun and unexpected problems arise all the time. Combined with the new code it is likely that there are bugs. Please report them although most probably we do not care (the spirit of Open Source!).

   As always you can download the source code on Codeplex which for some reason lags like hell in the last two days.