This is the first in a series of posts I've planned to explain what the Daily Parker blog engine actually is, how it works, and what's coming. I'll start with the most basic question: what the heck is a blog engine and why did I write one from scratch?
Simply put, a blog engine is software that handles all the plumbing for a blog. Substack is a blog, and it runs on a blog engine. WordPress is also a blog engine.
The Daily Parker has existed in some form or another since July 1997 and as something identifiable as a blog since May 1998. When I started posting things online, I manually edited HTML files and copied them to my company's web server. Version 1.0 of an identifiable blog engine read posts from an Access database and served them up using a scripting language called Active Server Pages. (The Wayback Machine's earliest capture of the braverman.org proto-blog was on 8 October 1999.)
I started calling this a "blog" when I deployed, with some frustration, a DasBlog site to my own web server in November 2005. That was version 3.0; I rolled out version 4.0 almost exactly 10 years later, this time running on BlogEngine.NET, which I forked (split off my own version) from the open source version available back then.
That's the context. Now the rationale.
Between DasBlog and BlogEngine.NET, I've had to make do with other people's design choices and coding styles, requiring hours of digging through code to make even simple changes. I could never get either of them to do everything I wanted, nor could I make them even work sometimes. You have no idea how many times I had to reboot BlogEngine.NET because its synchronous architecture got bogged down and crashed. The magic number was around 200 simultaneous users, whereupon the blog engine would spend so much time trying to handle its request queue that it could never get to new requests.
I finally got so sick of it that I decided to build the first iteration of a journaling application as a blog engine. It had to work, be easy to change, and provide at least the basic features people expect on blogs:
- Reverse-chronological browsing of posts
- WYSIWYG editing in both Markdown and HTML
- Tags for classifying posts
- Comments with approvals
- An attractive, modern look and feel
- Works on mobile devices and tablets
- Basic permissions to restrict who can post and what posts anonymous users can see
- Sign-on using external accounts, like Microsoft and Google
It also had to work in the modern software-development universe:
- The latest version of .NET with a clear update strategy
- The latest database architecture (NoSQL and JSON)
- Modern DevOps tools, especially continuous deployment
- Integration with the existing Inner Drive Technology stack
So, welcome to the public face of the Inner Drive Journal! At this writing, it's just the minimum-viable product, but the JIRA backlog is long and very cool. But because of how I designed and built it, it's easy to change, and the roadmap is pretty clear to me. And I'm proud of my work so far.
Next time: basic site architecture.
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