I am extremely happy to introduce the new Diago.co.za blog. I have owned this blog for a considerable amount of time and have to admit that I have lately let it down badly. The last 2 weeks or so I have spent a lot of time reorganising my life and while designing the new Mr Price SharePoint theme got bitten by the design bug. I played around with a few layouts but the current layout is the one that I finally decided to go with. It is a simple design but also slightly different from my normal attempts and I am extremely proud of the end result. In the process I also got to do some minor modifications to the SubText engine behind the site to be able to achieve some of the effects I wanted for the site.

The original design was done in Photoshop and then developed as the skin was being built using HTML and CSS. Halfway through the skinning process it occurred to me that the effect I wanted could not be achieved in SubText because of the way the skinning engine manages it’s controls. The main issue was the right hand sidebar which always displays the same number of items. I decided to research other blogging engines and was highly impressed with how the different blog engines have grown since I started using .Net blogging engines around 3 years ago. I looked at dasBlog again but feel it is a bit bloated for what I need, and unfortunately the Microsoft Asp Mvc based AtomSite failed during setup. I found BlogEngine.net extremely impressive and was actually able to build the complete skin I wanted with the 1.5RC release, however the widget sidebar provided the same limitation as SubText. After realising I will need to modify some code I decided to go back and look at SubText in more detail.

While I was searching for a new blog engine I was slightly disappointed to read the following article regarding the SubText blog engine, however it did happen to remind me that the codebase is open source and therefore I can make the modification I require myself, considering I am a .Net developer after all. I decided that I was going to spend a little time going through the code to determine if I can achieve the goals of my site design. I was highly excited when I realised I can make the changes I need, and some quick Google search even helped me understand what code changes needs to be done. This means that currently the site is running the latest SubText with some custom modification to provide the functionality I require. I must also say that I have been using SubText for over 2 years now and have really always liked the platform and the work that Phil Haack and his team put into the project, and I am hoping that I will be able to have these modifications included as options in future SubText releases.

The modifications I needed for the site was the following:

Separated Sidebar based on content. I was able to achieve this by adding a property to the SingleColumn control which allowed me to select the type of data I want to see using the build in Type enumerator provided by SubText. However because this control inherits from the caching control I had to also make it inherit from the base control to stop it from caching the same control over and over again. I need to do some more work around this to see if I can find a way to utilize caching and select the type of data I want to display. After making this change I was able to have different sidebars on different areas of the site.

LiveWriter excerpt support. When using LiveWriter I prefer using excerpts which for some reason was not implemented in the SubText LiveWriter implementation. After some debugging and Google searching I was able to add the ability to add excerpts when posting into LiveWriter and it has worked out brilliantly. I now just need to figure out how to put this support in place for ecto, and think I will be mailing the developers shortly for some advice.

I also took the time to clean up the site a little. I reposted all my code samples using the brilliant Code Snippet plug-in for LiveWriter and also moved some posts into the article section. I also removed all my posts around new releases, as they were cluttering the site with and I want to keep the content more original or more detailed rather then quick one paragraph posts. I have also re-enabled the comment feature and will be adding some more items and sections to the site going forward.

I am therefore very proud to present to you the new look Diago.co.za website and hope you like the work that was done.