As I had said a couple of weeks ago, I started working a new blog engine and look & feel for my corner of the web. I didn’t really spend a lot of time on this. It was mainly attracting my attention when I wanted to take my mind off the book and Microsoft-related work 🙂 As a result, it took longer than expected but the result was a complete rewrite of pblog. The blog engine should now be faster, produce more Web-cache-friendly output, and allow me to further expand it with new social networking features. Some key new features:

• Images are no longer retrieved from the database. All images are stored both in the relational DB (for archival purposes) but also on disk, so that no code is executed on an HTTP GET request.
• The URIs are now shorter.
• Archives are better organized.
• Those submitting comments can now request to get notified for follow-ups (this feature is almost ready).
• Categories have been added.
• Feeds for categories are also available so that you don’t have to read my random travel-related ramblings 🙂
• The web pages now make extensive use of divs for the layout and the XHTML should be better.

In the process, I’ve moved my web site from http://savas.parastatidis.name to http://savas.me, which is much easier to write and spell 🙂 All the permalinks of the old posts should be automatically re-directed through HTTP 301s. The only one that is not going to be redirected is the default page. If I’ve done everything correctly, you shouldn’t notice any changes. Even the old feeds will get redirected. Just for good measure, though, the new feeds are:

• http://savas.me/blog/feed/rss
• http://savas.me/blog/feed/atom

If you want feeds for the categories, the template URI looks like this:

• http://savas.me/blog/feed/rss/{category}
• http://savas.me/blog/feed/atom/{category}

For example… http://savas.me/blog/feed/atom/web. The web page of each category has the link to its atom feed.

I am planning to go through all my old blog posts and categorize them but this is going to take a while. This way the category cloud will emerge.

Please let me know if you encounter any problems at all or you want to send your feedback on the new look & feel. You can email me directly at savas@parastatidis.name or try to leave a comment here (if the comments work 🙂

BTW… I am still looking for a name for the blog!

Geek details: The engine is now built on top of .NET 3.5 SP1 and makes extensive use of SQL to LINQ. The DB is SQL Server 2008 and everything is hosted in the 3rd of the hosting providers I tried over the last month.