We are using Community Server as our blogging software of choice. This is a fine product, and has won all kinds of awards. It's the de facto standard for building web communities with Microsoft's .Net platform. It's got tons of features like photo galleries, forums, blogs, and all kinds of goodies that we'll likely never use.
The trouble is that it assumes that you're running an online community, not a single blog. It expects that when a user comes to your site, they want to see an aggregated view of blog posts, photo galleries, articles, and forum posts from all the people in the community. The trouble is that we don't want that. We just want to host our single blog!
I installed Community Server at the root of our web site. Since Community Server thinks you want to run a community, it puts a big aggregated view of the community on the homepage of the site. But that's not what I want. I want our blog's homepage to show up. Community Server relegated our blog to www.dougandbec.net/blogs/dougandbec/default.aspx. That's the page I really want to show.
How to do this?
I said a couple of days ago that I was using Timothy Humphrey's subdomain module for Community Server. This is a cool module that will allow you to basically redirect subdomains to specific places on your site. For example, it would allow you to type in blog.dougandbec.net and get to www.dougandbec.net/blogs/dougandbec/default.aspx. Pretty cool, but there was a glitch. It mangled some URLs quite badly, and I wasn't quite sure how to fix it. There were docs on it, but I didn't have time to read them. Go figure. So I decided against that.
The easy route
Instead I went the easy route and created a default.htm file in the root of our web site. It immediately redirects to our blog homepage. This is bad for a couple of reasons:
- It breaks the Back button
Since the default.htm page loads for a brief moment but immediately redirects, the browser saves the default.htm file in the history. When you click the back button, the default.htm page reloads and again instantly redirects you back to my blog homepage.
This is kinda like the game I play with Audrey when I hold her down and say, "Go see mom!" As she struggles to get away from me, I keep coaxing her, "Why aren't you going to go see mom?" A small measure of fun is had at first (mostly by me) but it quickly turns to frustration for Audrey and results in general ill will in the family. That's what breaking the Back button is like.
- The screen flickers quite a bit
This is also a consequence of loading the default.htm page for a brief moment. The screen goes completely black, then flickers as the browser is redirected. This isn't nearly as intrusive as breaking the back button, but it's still ugly.
Still not satisfied
I'm still not satisfied with this approach, mainly because of the above problems, but partially just because it doesn't seem like the right thing to do. Oh well. Maybe soon I'll figure out a more elegant way.
In the mean time, Bec's dad is starting a blog on our server. Maybe we'll have use for that aggregated community view after all!