I forgot who I was talking to recently about the CMS running my site. For the uninitiated, here's a bit of background; I had been playing with the beta bits of the .NET framework. I knew that I would want a place online to put up articles and such. Unfortunately, my webhost didn't have it installed so I had to do something in ASP. The first post was on August 27th, 2001, about 6 or 7 months before the release of the framework ... it was just a test of the little project I was working on. I had grand visions of my site becoming a content site where I (and others) would post articles and code snippets. Of course, it never quite got to that. I usually found other places to publish my stuff so in the end, this really became more of a blog. Despite the fact that blogging was not in it's original charter, the little CMS engine that could has held up quite admirably. I've never had to add very many features to keep up with the likes of today's popular blogging engines. And, for being written in Classic ASP, it had some pretty nifty features ...
Data Caching
Most of the front page is caching the data it retrieves from the database. It's using techniques like the Recordset's GetRows() and GetString() methods whenever
possible. The resulting array or string gets put into an application variable. When a new record was posted,
the "cache" is deleted (ie. set to empty string ;-) ) so it could be repopulated upon a subsequent load of the
front page.
To this very day, this site runs (and quite nicely IMHO) on an MS Access backend. I've never had any performance
issues ... of course, that being said, I don't get as much traffic as one of the bigger sites ;-)
RSS
Back before RSS was cool, this site had an RSS feed. That's why
it's only using rss v0.91. If I had known better at the time, I would have implemented that feed as an HTTP
handler.
Ghetto Web Services
Back before web services were cool, this site had has web services. Not in the traditional sense, but it was
still available to serve via the web. I had a .aspx file outputting javascript to dynamically write out the last
few articles on my site. This page could then be referenced on an html page using the a script tag. So although
the data was being defined on the ASP.NET platform, the "javascript" file could be referenced from PHP, or
Coldfusion. Cross-platform baby!
Up until recently, I had another service set up in a similar fashion. This script would serve ads,
so the ads could be managed on the asp.net server, and deployed on another site regardless of the platform.
All in all, my little CMS has been good to me ... there's a lot of sentimental value. But I guess
the time has to come at some point that I'll have to replace it. I don't know when that will be, but I think I'm
ready for something new on my site ... if at least a new design. We'll see.