Hey folks!

I have been spring cleaning the server side over the last few days, and you may have noticed some changes go live on the site this week. 

CRUD and WebAPI

Initially I was creating blog posts by an editor and good old fashioned HTML, this then had to be parsed through a line break removal system then inserted into SQL. Quite laborious indeed! I just never had time to fix it up, and it didn't matter too much. Since this weekend though, that has all changed.

Introducing CRUD

CRUD in the world of HTTP makes use of the request types available, and that's pretty much what I have done with the sites blog controller. As an admin, I can now create, update and delete articles; which is extremely helpful - especially when integrated with the JavaScript HTML editor CKEditor.

WebAPI

The changes to this only affect the in-dev Windows Store App version of the site I am creating; simply amended to reflect the changes made with CRUD.

Authentication

This is extremely crude at the moment, but should lay some foundations for future extension. It was mainly added as a way to secure the above CRUD functions, but I figured it would be quite a neat way to store some email addresses, so you can get a notification when I update my blog.

I am going to post some more in-depth detail regarding this as there isn't much in date stuff on the web. In short, the system is built on the MVC Identity and OWIN (and OAuth) frameworks. The OWIN part is implemented but not used; I figured the only appropriate place for external authentication would be for comments - but DISQUS does the job well enough.

Notification

This was pretty sweet to work on. If you register with my site, you will receive an email with a summary of the new blog. I based it on the HTML template I built a year ago for SABIC - making some minor style and optimization tweaks. What I like so much about what I did, was making use of a view model to generate the email. So feel free to register an account, I am sure at some point I will be adding some features that will apply specifically to authenticated users.

General

I've also fixed some of the bugs I have found on the mobile and tablet versions of the site. The biggest gripe I had was the horrid blue glow that stuck on focused buttons - which on mobile IE happens just from scrolling.