The switch to MiniBlog

One of the things I had been wanting to take a deeper look at for a while has been MiniBlog. It is a very lightweight blog system started by Mads Kristensen. As I worked for a few years with Mads on BlogEngine.NET, I was curious to spend some time taking a closer look at what made it go.

MiniBlog is an ASP.NET Web Page project and there just isn't much to it. There is some code files in the app_code folder and then you have razor views and javascript. It is amazing how much functionality is there in such a minimal project.

MiniBlog doesn't offer all the features of BlogEngine.NET and that wasn't the goal, but as I poked around, I started adding features I would want as a way of learning the ins and outs. Adding pages back in was pretty easy although the routing isn't as clean as I wanted. BlogEngine.NET pages use a /page/my-page-title route and MiniBlog uses /page/2 for the paging of your post list. I just combined them together so both work, but a page title 2 would be trouble.

Also, while I like the concept Mads used for the admin menu and editing, it didn't feel nice to me. However, as you'd expect, you can easily change this and build those changes into your custom theme. By making these changes in your theme, you don't effect the project files and continue to pull updates without merging.

I decided to go ahead and migrate my blog over to MiniBlog for a while. I'm kind of inspired to make a lot more changes to this little system to make it suit what I want. We'll see where that take me.