If you visit our actual blog page as opposed to just keeping up with our postings in your RSS reader then you will have noticed we’ve updated our blog design. Actually, we’ve just integrated our blog seamlessly into our entire website – though the blog still maintains it’s own unique URL (rockfishblog.com).
We have developed a number of blogs for companies and get requests to license our blog engine to organizations that want a solution they can install and manage internally. We decided to take some time and make a number of back-end changes to the blog that would both allow us to deploy new blogs very quickly along with licensing the code to third parties.
I asked our developer on the project to give me a quick technical summary and here is his response:
The new blog engine has been redesigned from the bottom up to work in a wide variety of environments. The engine is fully compliant with SQL Server 2000 and ASP.NET 2.0. It makes use of the jQuery JavaScript libraries to add new effects and AJAX integration.
The design engine that drives the public facing view of the blog is fully configurable. While the default options for the blog add styling to the existing links, text, and controls, the design engine makes use of ASP.NET User Controls and Master Pages to allow you to change the layout of any pages to suit your needs.
That description will appeal to any development shop that is interested in our blog technology but mean absolutely nothing to the majority of us. For the rest of us it basically means lower implementation costs and shorter time to market.