Contents tagged with Orchard
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Configure Open Live Writer to weblogs.asp.net
I have not blogged for a while. When I opened my Open Live Writer, I got error with https://weblogs.asp.net/lichen/xmlrpc.
I searched the web. Most blogs were still referencing the xmlrpc url which no longer exists.
Fortunately, Fixing is easy. Just Add Account and select “Other services”
On the next screen, enter the url of the blog (without xmlrpc).
Open Live Writer and Orchard are smart enough to figure out the rest. This is certainly an improvement over the earlier versions.
If you are curious on how Open Live Writer figured out the post API endpoint, which view the source of your web page and you will see the following lines in the header:
<link href="https://weblogs.asp.net/lichen/XmlRpc/LiveWriter/Manifest" rel="wlwmanifest" type="application/wlwmanifest+xml" />
<link href="https://weblogs.asp.net/lichen/rsd" rel="EditURI" title="RSD" type="application/rsd+xml" /> -
Running an intern program
This year I am running an unpaid internship program for high school students. I work for a small company. We have ideas for a few side projects but never have time to do them. So we experiment by making them intern projects. In return, we give these interns guidance to learn, personal attentions, and opportunities with real-world projects.
A few years ago, I blogged about the idea of teaching kids to write application with no more than 6 hours of training. This time, I was able to reduce the instruction time to 4 hours and immediately put them into real work projects. When they encounter problems, I combine directions, pointer to various materials on w3school, Udacity, Codecademy and UTube, as well as encouraging them to search for solutions with search engines. Now entering the third week, I am more than encouraged and feeling accomplished. Our the most senior intern, Christopher Chen, is a recent high school graduate and is heading to UC Berkeley to study computer science after the summer. He previously only had one year of Java experience through the AP computer science course but had no web development experience. Only 12 days into his internship, he has already gain advanced css skills with deeper understanding than more than half of the “senior” developers that I have ever worked with. I put him on a project to migrate an existing website to the Orchard content management system (CMS) with which I am new as well. We were able to teach each other and quickly gain advanced Orchard skills such as creating custom theme and modules. I felt very much a relationship similar to the those between professors and graduate students. On the other hand, I quite expect that I will lose him the next summer to companies like Google, Facebook or Microsoft.
As a side note, Christopher and I will do a two part Orchard presentations together at the next SoCal code camp at UC San Diego July 27-28. The first part, “creating an Orchard website on Azure in 60 minutes”, is an introductory lecture and we will discuss how to create a website using Orchard without writing code. The 2nd part, “customizing Orchard websites without limit”, is an advanced lecture and we will discuss custom theme and module development with WebMatrix and Visual Studio.
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Fun with Orchard, Webmatrix, Git and Azure
Why Orchard?
Our company wants to convert an old html site to a content management system. We considered between Wordpress and Orchard and picked Orchard. This post strongly influenced us. It is ASP.NET MVC vs php. We are a .net shop. We thought it would be easier to do custom development with Orchard.
Why Webmatrix?
There are a few reason we used Webmatrix:
- Webmatrix works with Orchard very well. Many Orchard training materials use Webmatrix.
- Webmatrix is free. We have interns here working on Orchard. We do not have to consume a Visual Studio license.
- Webmatrix has an excellent story working with both Git and Azure.
Why Git?
We would like to have a version control system. Git is a free and open source distributed version control system. There are several free Git hosts, such as GitHub, Codeplex, and BitBucket. So we picked Git.
Why Azure?
We would like to have website that our entire team can see. Azure web site is an excellent option for us. It is very easy to host Orchard with an Azure website, either with Sql Compact Edition or with Azure SQL Database. Azure also integrates with Git very well.
So how do they work together?
Although it is possible to edit a Azure hosted web site directly with Webmatrix, we hosted out source code in Git because we need a source control system.
It is very easy to work with Git from Webmatrix. One can use git with an existing site or open a site directly from git.
The Sql Server migration solution in Webmatrix is amongst the easiest way to migrate a Sql CE database to Azure SQL Database.
It is also fairly easy to setup an Azure website to pull source code from git directly and build the source code. Each time when we push a changeset to git, Azure is notified and it will automatically pull and build the website. For Orchard, the “built” is actually not more than an xcopy. We just need to embed a .deployment file in our source code. See David Haden’s post for more details.
