Xparo Blog - ASP.NET, jQuery, Silverlight, Sharepoint, contentXXL and more ...

We had this idea coming up with a dedicated web technology blog years ago when everybody around us started with blogging. But due to increased workload we could never realise our idea...until now, as we reserved a little time from our daily business and everybody chipped in to make it work*.  

Instead of boring you with a phase based description ("first we wrote a specification of...then we made some colorful layout..."...yawn... - which in fact didn't happen that way) of how this blog emerged we chose a kind of interview form to describe the making of.

Q: What are the objectives of Xparo Blog?

A:Our intention is to post problem-solving content, how-to's and tips and tricks around ASP.NET, Sharepoint, contentXXL and frontend-techniques like JavaScript. Furthermore we'd like to blog about rather 'soft' factors like marketing and usability related issues,anything that touches ASP.NET web development in a broader sense.Thats why we don't see the blog's audience restricted to webdevelopers only.

Q: Who are the authors?

A: All contributors are working for the Xparo Gmbh. Of course the blog content derives from problem solving activities during our daily work, e.g. application errors after windows update, IIS-problems during debugging or how to configure automated backups for SQL server. A few days ago we even provided a jQuery 3D plugin free for use.

Q: Is this a wordpress blog?

A: (silence) No. We're using contentXXL, our prefered asp.net-based content management system. Although contentXXL sometimes behaves like a diva it meets our requirements for building enterprise content management systems. For this blog we used the contentXXL blog Module and our Xparo Social Media Module. We are using contentXXL standards like the templating engine and out of the box publishing features as well as customized state-of-the-art-features like social bookmarking, facebook and twitter API-functionality and gravatars for the comment section. In reference to the like / dislike pattern  seen on many websites we also implemented our own 'like'-module which is the base for the counter module 'top rated'. 

Q: Are you using images for your headlines?

A: Yes, but this images get automatically transformed through a text-to-png-function (e.g. also used on http://www.jack-wolfskin.com) and alt tags are also set automatically, so that search engines like these headlines. The great advantage is: you can create a unique design with no loss of text recognition through search engines.

Q: How did the blog emerge?

A: Nina started with setting up the main layout and templating / configurating the main areas of the blog. We began then with writing the first posts, working on the layout and feature developing at the same. We're convinced that this method of parallelizing templating, feature developing and writing content was the main reason that the blog could be set up in less than 4 weeks. Content, layout and functionality were set in relation to each other from the beginning. We could therefore recognise and solve typical problems like "layout doesn't fit the content", "functionality does not meet the expected usability" very early. We think that if we adopted a classical waterfall method ( information architecture -> layout -> templating ->configuration & development -> delivering content) we couldn't have launched the blog within this short period of time.

To do's have been directly posted into our "to do item list" in the development version of the blog and were discussed and priorized in short-termed ad hoc meetings which gave us a great flexibility. Before going live we finally took care about SEO issues: Metatags have been set, an RSS-feed has been linked up, a xmlsitemap (bot- and userfriendly) has been set up, the URL structure has been optimized and so on. Right now we're thinking about back links and trying to establish our blog in the relevant blogosphere.

A: What are your expectations?

We hope that we can contribute useful content to the asp.net / front end community as well as to rather specialized topics like Sharepoint and contentXXL. Furthermore we're expecting that we will also get valuable input gained from the users feedback. We see this blog still as work in progress, because our environment (technology, business topics, ...) rapidly changes.

* special thanks to: Asya, Flo, Jutta, Matze, Nina, Sebastian, Wladi