jeffaBlog

This weekend I finally launched my latest website: Galactic Beacon.

Galactic Beacon is the name of a science fiction and fantasy anthology that I’ll be publishing in eBook format within a couple of weeks.

The site is also home to a comic that will be included in the anthology, that is designed to look good on an eReader.

The comic is free on the website, but the anthology on eReader will be sold via various sources (Kindle store for instance). I’m also working on an app for the Palm WebOS for reading the book.

I will also sell various formats of the book directly from the site (ePub, PDF, etc.) for eReaders that allow you to download your own files.

Readers of this blog might be interested in knowing that this is an instance of my new jeffaBlogger comic/blog engine that uses ASP.Net MVC.

I hope everyone will take a look and let me know what you think.

It’s been a looong time coming, but the first alpha site using jeffablogger is now live.

I’ve converted my webcomic, Funzietown, to use my MVC based jeffablogger instead of the un-named web-forms based blog/comic engine I made back in ‘08.

The webcomic is aimed at kids, so I’ve turned off a bunch of the features of jeffablogger. You can’t register, for instance, because if you keep contact info on a site that is marketed at children you have to verify ages. That sounds like a hassle and potential lawsuit to me, so I disabled registering.

The goal for the user experience for a reader is to look and work like every other blog or comic you’ve ever read.

The goal for the user experience for admins, editors, writers, and artists is to be as smooth and easy as possible. Of course you can’t see those bits yet on the beta site.

I have a few more features to add before declaring beta status (feature complete for this release). OK, I have a fair number of features I want to add, but I’ll try to constrain myself to what I can finish within the next month or so.

Once I reach beta status, I will add unit tests and concentrate on bug fixes until ready to release as open source. Once tests are in place and I feel like my code is pretty I’ll release the project to Codeplex.

As part of beta testing I’ll convert our user group site GGMUG.com and debut a science fiction site that I’ve been planning. That will give me three sites using the engine, so I should get pretty good feedback on bugs.

"There's not much spam in the spam and eggs."

Monty Python had it right. There sure is a lot of spam.

I've reached the point on this blog that I'm sufficiently annoyed by the comment spam that I will do something about it. Not immediately, mind you, but soon.

When I switch over to the jeffablogger engine, I'm either not going to bring any comments along, or selectively prune them down to just the real comments (or what I think are real).

I'm also going to implement anti comment spam measures like Antispam from Typepad or Akismet.

I have avoided doing so for a long time because I wanted free-flow of ideas, but it has reached the point where there are just a ton of meaningless posts that are simply there to get the linkback.

There are sites that give you lists of hapless blogs such as this one where comments can be added without moderation. I am on a few of those.

Now the real humor here will be when we see if anyone is BOLD enough to leave comment spam on THIS post.

Made pretty good progress over the past few weeks.

• Converted to MVC2 with no major headaches.
• Reduced scope from all-purpose content management system to basic blog engine that works with webcomics as first class citizens
• Refactored to use Repository pattern for model access.
• Implemented several Repositories using Entity Framework
• Got tired of Entity Framework (the current, shipping version)
• Re-did all Repositories with Linq To SQL
• Got main bits of the blog functionality working
• Create blog entries
• Editor or Admin must approve before display
• Display blog
• Admin settings to display Extract or Full Content (for most recent post or for older posts)
• Paging of archive
• Working on Basic Page functionality
• Began working on import functionality

Once I finish the Basic Page functionality, I will add the Comic functionality. When that reaches an adequate state I’ll set up an Alpha test website.

During the Alpha phase I will continue to add functionality and refine the UI.

Once I reach Beta status, I’ll begin to convert existing sites to use the new blog engine.

When things are looking good I’ll release the code as an open source project, probably on Codeplex.