roncli.com blog

Now playing: Rise Against - Savior (4:02)

With the Gate project being all but ditched, I have focused attention on the roncli.com redesign I've been promising for over a year now.

The new roncli.com website will initially combine my main site and my blog. However, it will also eventually be home to the defunct projects website and, of course, The Nightstalker's music.

And I must say. This site is turning out to be bad ass.

The site is heavy into jQuery. In fact, the entire login process is done via jQuery AJAX. The latest blog article is shown on the front page - also loaded via jQuery AJAX - and you can go through posts by clicking the appropriate icons. And my does it load fast.

I really am having a blast updating this thing, and I hope to have something live before year's end. That is, if the Cataclysm doesn't completely sidetrack me first.

Labels: Blog, Coding, Gate, roncli.com, The Nightstalker

Friday, October 02, 2009

An Experiment
Posted: 5:53:00 PM 0 comments

Six Minutes To Release seems to be my favorite testing grounds for experimental code lately. Fortunately, the RSS experiment was a success.

This one involves moving the ViewState off of the HTML page and on to the database. Some of the ViewStates were getting huge, even when I'd try to manage the size of the ViewState. So I decided to take that out of the HTML to slim some pages down. So far it seems to be working, but it hasn't been up for too long.

This caused me to rethink my ASP.Net model, and I ended up putting data that I usually store in a separate class, such as login information, into the class that inherits System.Web.UI.Page. Makes it much cleaner in my opinion, as I don't have to store references to Response, Request, and Server.

So we'll see how this goes. This is all based on an idea I got for Gate, and if it goes well I'll end up using it in Gate as well. Should be fun.

Labels: Coding, Gate, Six Minutes To Release, ViewState

Monday, September 21, 2009

Gate
Posted: 1:39:00 AM 0 comments

In a recent post, I mentioned that I was combining roncli.com, my projects site, and this blog into one website. Well, work on it has begun, and it's called Gate. The name Gate is actually short for Aggregate, which I will somehow work into the main theme.

Gate itself aims to be an open source, modular project. The first three modules will be a wiki, a Blogger-supported blog, and a project management module. I've been working on the SQL Server database setup the last week and a half or so and have it just about completed. Now I gotta write the repair script, which is what happens when installation goes wrong. It's been pretty fun, as I've been using jQuery and jQuery UI for the interface, allowing for the installation to be robust and user friendly.

The challenge is going to be figuring out how I want to do the modules. There are two problems to solve here. First, I need to figure out how to handle database usage between the modules and the core application. I'm using LINQ to SQL to build the data structures and synchronizing them with SMO, so theoretically the modules could use a separate LINQ to SQL file for the same database, but that might not be very optimal.

Second, I need to figure out if I am going to be able to just drag and drop modules into the /bin directory or if I'm going to have to compile it into the main website. The design strategy is to keep things simple for the user to install, so it would be nice if I didn't have to recompile things for every module. I know how to do plugins for desktop applications, as I have in Solar, a TCP/IP text processing engine that I've written that allows users to write their own plugins to process the text however they want to. Would it work for websites, or even make sense for them? That is the challenge ahead of me.

The nice part of it, like I said, is that it's open source. I'm doing this mostly for myself, and if others can get good use out of it, that's great. And if I can get others to help out with the code, that's even better. But until I have a functional version, I'm pretty much just going to write the core module plus the wiki, blog, and projects modules myself. Once the new roncli.com is online, then I'll look into releasing Gate as its own project.

Labels: Blog, Coding, Gate, Projects, roncli.com, Solar