When I initially started hosting my own web site, I had a single domain name: www.imaginaryrealities.com. Since then, I’ve taken advantage of the subdomain support of my hosting provider, WebHost4Life, and I’ve added additional subdomains to my collection such as services.imaginaryrealities.com, downloads.imaginaryrealities.com, media.imaginaryrealities.com, and others. In addition, I’ve started other web sites for other purposes. For example, I host my wife’s classroom website on my account at http://www.mrscollinsclassroom.net. The end result, is that while I started with a single web site, over time I’ve added more.

The traditional model for hosting multiple web sites is that I register the domains or subdomains with the hosting provider, and then I point the domain to a directory on my hosting account where the files for the web site will be hosted from. In the majority of cases, each web site points to a different directory, and a different application. For example, both my blog and my wife’s web site are built using BlogEngine.NET. To accomplish this, I have two copies of BlogEngine.NET installed in two different directories of my hosting account. Twice the space for two web sites. It would be great if, with my new web site engine that I’m building, I could consolidate all of these web sites to a single application installation. This post will show you how I’m thinking of doing this. More...

I’m once again picking up on a project to build a new web site. I’m happy with BlogEngine.NET running my blog, but I’m looking for more features that a blog. As I hopefully build my ImaginaryFinance idea to completion, what I really want for this site is to turn ImaginaryRealities.com into a full company portal that will feature my blog, plus product information, a knowledge base, support site, discussion forums, an online store, and provide other company and customer-related features. More...

It’s the weekend, it’s my birthday, and I’m taking time away from all of my various client and company projects and working on my things for the day. Yesterday, the Umbraco 4 was released. Great job Umbraco team and congratulations. Maybe one day I’ll be as lucky with one of the side projects that I’m working on. I spent a few minutes last night downloading the release, importing it into my Subversion repository, and then merging it with the web site that I had started. The merge went pretty smoothly. Now it’s time to go back to exploring what I perceive my needs to be and learning how to further extend Umbraco.

The first thing that comes to mind is that if I want to use Umbraco to support a commercial web site, there are parts of Umbraco that I want to be secured via SSL. For example, a payment screen for a product, the user registration screen, or the user login screen could all be protected using SSL. Is it possible to have a mixed HTTP/HTTPS site using Umbraco? Absolutely. I actually set up the infrastructure for supporting this in an earlier post, which I suggest that you read in case you haven’t. More...

Continuing on my previous posts, I’ve been looking into Umbraco more. I’m really liking the new features for version 4.0. My main complaint about it in previous versions when I looked at Umbraco were the proprietary membership database, and the difficulty of doing ASP.NET things with it. All of that seems to have been fixed with the upcoming 4.0 release. Umbraco now uses the ASP.NET membership and role providers, and templates have been replaced with ASP.NET master pages. In addition, direct support now exists for ASP.NET controls within pages. All-in-all, Umbraco 4.0 is shaping up to be a great release, in my opinion, and looks like it will be a great CMS for all purposes.

The one feature that is missing from Umbraco v4 is built-in support for ASP.NET themes. Umbraco supports CSS style sheets, but there are key uses for themes to control and customize the look-and-feel of web sites that is very special in ASP.NET, and a necessity for ASP.NET-based web sites. Umbraco would be killer if it supports that feature. Fortunately, as I discovered, it’s not that hard to add support for ASP.NET themes, and it’s even possible to let different parts of your web site use different themes. More...

I’ve been looking through the Umbraco web site all day, and doing some web searches on various topics of interest that interested me before. While the documentation is still a little sparse, I really do like a lot of the improvements that they’ve made in version 4.0. I installed and downloaded the release candidate from CodePlex. More...

In this post, I'll continue my discussion of the construction of a new web site for ImaginaryRealities.com by discussing how I'm going to use ASP.NET themes to style and configure the "look" for my new web site. ASP.NET 2.0 introduced a new feature called themes which allows responsibilities on a web site to be truly separated between a developer that implements functionality and a designer that implements style. Using themes, the same web site can take on several different looks through a simple modification of the Web.config or application setting in a production environment. New looks can also be easily developed and deployed without making modifications to the existing web site. This post will discuss what ASP.NET themes are, how they work, and how they can be used in an ASP.NET web site or application. More...

In my last post, I discussed using the Yahoo! User Interface Library to start designing an ASP.NET web site. In my next post, I'll continue that discussion. But first, there's a little housekeeping chore that I want to discuss related to maximizing the amount of people that can view your web site. ASP.NET, and in general the entire .NET platform and Windows, all have rich support for globalization and localization. I like to think of globalization and localization as the creation of multicultural applications and web sites. Using globalization and localization, applications, or in this case web sites, can be used across multiple languages and cultures while respecting the specific cultural requirements, and without changing any code. More...

The hardest part of starting a new web site design is coming up with the killer layout for the site. There are many issues to consider when designing site and implementing the design. Do you use table-based layouts or CSS layouts? If you use CSS layouts do you float specific columns to the left or right side? How big should the page or columns be? What order do I need to put the content in the web page in order to maximize the search engine optimization? How do I do a negative margin to move my secondary content before my primary content? Fortunately, the wonderful developers at Yahoo! thought up some of these issues for you already and provide a great open source toolkit to help take some of these decisions away and make the implementation quicker and much, much easier. More...

Below is the illustration of the new architecture that I would like to build for the new ImaginaryRealities.com web site:

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In my last post, I discussed what my production environment looks like for ImaginaryRealities.com. In this post, I'll discuss my development environment that I'm using to build the ImaginaryRealities.com web site. I won't focus so much on the hardware than on the software and tools that I'm using to build the web site. More...