So I was considering building a blog engine. I even started a few times but I was never really happy with the result. I built a few variants using ASP.NET Web Forms, a couple using ASP.NET MVC and my most recent attempt was some kind of weird Angular and ASP.NET Web Pages hybrid. Anyway, none of them really worked out. Then, somehow, I stumbled upon the mini blog by Mads Kristensen a beautifully simple blog engine built on ASP.NET Web Pages and Razor.

It was love at first fork.

I downloaded, tweaked a few things to my own personal taste and voilà: A new mini blog is born.

The best part in my humble opinion is that there’s no database! Every post is stored in a separate XML file including all meta data. This makes for some more IO of course, but the solution leverages the HttpRuntime Cache to remove the need to read posts from disk on every load. In fact the load time is ridiculously low and the entire blog is more than performant.

So now that I’ve finally gotten around to stealing a blog, instead of building one of my own, my hope is that I’ll find the time to share some of my thoughts on web development in general and perhaps EPiServer in particular. Next up is a post on Google Search Appliance in .NET projects.

My love to Mads (and everyone else involved in the project) for a superb blog engine.