Hello WordPress!

With the phasing out of the blog spaces on Windows Live, I’ve migrated to WordPress.com. This is my first WordPress post (an edit of the auto-generated “Hello World” post).

From my first impressions, I’m quite pleased with WordPress. I hadn’t looked at it in a number of years, and it’s come quite a long way. This isn’t my main blogging site, however. My main posts are all at kb.Gilleland.info. But, this will probably be my cross-posting site where I’ll do summaries of the “real” post.

Advertisements

Cross-Posted Blogs

I’ve finally set up a more centralized location for all my bloggings and articles at kb.Gilleland.info (where the “kb” stands for “Knowledge Base”). I will still have blog posts here, but my own website will have these and other articles/blogs as well.

HTTP Handlers and HTTP Modules

I’ve run across an article – "HTTP Handlers and HTTP Modules in ASP.NET" – that provides a nice introduction and background on the topic, so I thought I would mention it here (for myself and others). The article is from 2002, but it still serves as a good introduction.

Re: Creating Custom Route Constraints

Stephen Walther writes an article on creating custom route constraints for web apps. One particularly interesting constraint is to only allow a certain URL to run if it is run from the local machine (which can be great for an admin to check something that others shouldn’t be able to). Here’s an excerpt:

Creating a Local Constraint

You also can create a custom constraint that prevents a request from matching a URL unless the request is made from the local machine. This type of constraint can be useful for restricting access to website administrative pages.

…

The LocalConstraint simply checks whether the current request is a local request by taking advantage of the Request.IsLocal property. This property returns the value True when the host is either equal to localhost or 127.0.0.1.

He goes further by offering suggestions on how to write unit tests for these constraints, illustrating how to fake the HttpContext (look in the download code for this one).

RE: App_Code vs. ascx: Differences you should know…

I just wanted to make note on my blog of an article by Nathanael Jones about relative paths and whether you use user controls (ascx) or opt to make Control subclasses in App_Code. Overall, it’s a nice article, and a good reminder of some subtle differences in the two approaches.

Daily Chess Puzzle

A friend recently introduced me to GameKnot – a place that you can play chess online with others. Among the other interesting features are the Daily Puzzles, which you can also embed in your own site, as I have done on my instructor site. It doesn’t insert well into this blog, however, as the script filtering on this rich-text editor strips out the javascript reference that is required to get the game on the site.

 

I was, however, able to get the game on my instructor site at NAIT.

Tectonic Plates

Every once in a while I like to go to Discovery Channel Online and view some of the various shows. This was a neat show about our Earth’s tectonic activity, and I thought I would mention it briefly in my blog (if only so I remember the link :).