Update to ASP.NET

Last month I updated my website (mostly to present my projects better). The upgrade included using a free template I found online and then manually creating each page in HTML. The result looked alright but it was a pain to change most of the pages. If I wanted to add a new page, I had to update all the pages with the added link in the header. Or, if I wanted to insert a new project, I had to update the project index present at the bottom of all the project pages. Worse yet, it was very easy for one mistake to occur in all the copy and pasting.

I decided to upgrade to an ASP.NET Web App. The first step was finding all the common elements between each page and moving them to a single Master Page. The beauty of this is that if I need to add a new page to the navigation bar, I simply update the Master Page. Additionally, the projects directory has its own Master Page nested inside the main website's Master Page. It programmatically generates the project directory present at the bottom of each project page which makes things so much easier to update.

Finally, I was able to migrate to Microsoft's Azure web hosting platform. Previously, I had been using Dreamhost's VPS and a simple apache server that pointed to a root directory containing my static website. Now, the website is dynamically generated and updating the website is as easy as clicking the "Publish" button in Visual Studio.

As a final note, I decided to have a little fun with the site and added an web site manager page located at http://www.salgat.net/Manager/. It's nothing fancy, but I added a view count tracker using a SQL database that holds a ViewCount entry that is incremented every time a new session is started. I don't actually care much about this (I'm sure most of the views are just web crawlers anyways) but it's a great chance to learn more. I think from here I'm going to add a login for the page and do things like have a table of unique IPs stored with a view count associated with each IP. What's nice is that I'm using the Azure hosting platform again for hosting the database. I was pretty impressed with the pricing, as the combined cost of the web app hosting and database hosting is roughly the same as a VPS with Dreamhost, which means I'll drop Dreamhost's VPS hosting altogether and just use it as a domain provider.

For those who want to check out the progress, I have the project hosted on GitHub. I made sure to use .gitignore for things like Web.config to prevent secure information (database password) from being released.

https://github.com/Salgat/Personal-Website