Blog Alias Recap

/ September 12, 2007

Well the blog alias feature is in, and the self spam in my referral section has reduced significantly since I started using it last night. Its also nice not seeing Google and Yahoo spidering my blog on 4 different domains (still don’t know how they got 2 of them).

How To Use

  • Blog edit screen has a list all the domain aliases, and a button to add a new alias.
  • If an alias is found, redirects request to the associated blog.
  • Aliases can be at both the host and subfolder level.
    Note: Requests are validated against blogs first, so if there is only one blog with a give host name then subfolder aliases would not work.

Lessons

  • Rob Conery is for the most part right about the provider model. Having both a data provider and an object provider with wrapper objects over that on top of that seemed to be a little overkill. But even so, figuring out where to put the changes was one of the more enjoyable parts of the change, which was paid for when I implemented the change. I also learned that it is better then the way we do it at work (think really big Page_Load functions).
  • I still don’t care much post backs, especially after a pseudo-AJAX/JavaScript framework at work since .Net 1.0. They aren’t as bad as I remembered them being, but the refresh popup when navigating is annoying.
  • Seeing a message appear in my email about the build being broken within 30 minutes of committing is somewhat disheartening. Thankfully it wasn’t my code, though it did make me look at aggregate blogs which I had missed when testing.
  • That I learned far more from making changes to the code then I would have from just reading through it.

Areas for improvement

  • The formatting of the host admin page could likely be improved some.
  • Possibly add more validation to prevent overlap of aliases between blogs.
  • The requests seem a little bit chatty with the database, looks to be something with the lookup for cookie paths.

What’s Next

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