Really proud to announce that after 3 weeks of hard work, my blog has recently joined a family of umbraco powered websites.

As a big fan of umbraco, just wanted to show you the main features of this blog and the advantage of umbraco/.NET technology in general.

Comments = Chat

My articles dont get many comments (as yet), still, I wanted to present them in the most readable and structural-corrent way possible. As you see each comment is listed in standard 1 by 1 layout, however each reply is placed directly under comment you reply to. This tree design works pretty well upto 6 levels. Comment form pops up in the lightbox and once submitted, website refreshed itself in the background and navigates the user right to the newly posted comment. IP Address is recorded and immediately I get a notification with the comment content and direct links to remove the comment and/or block the ip address. If you're replying to an exisitng comment, your reply is expanded by default so you can see your comment :) - so it is if your search result points to comment reply.

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Umbraco Base

Used in sevral places such as homepage Featured Articles scroller (load as you scroll) and articles explorer calendar (I will get the lightbox fixed so it lists all the articles posted on a selected date).

Umbraco Membership Provider

Fully integrated usercontrols which help me to restrict the access to a certain areas of the website. Again, how easy and user friendly it is to restrict the folder by either members group or single login. Still not sure about members area but I will update it as soon as I'll come up with some interesting idea!

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Inline Usercontrols

Used for in-article galleries. I've got 2 kinds of inline galleries - scroller which shows all the images in a specific media folder and picasa gallery lightbox style - which allows me to pick the picasa album from which I want to display the images. I love richtextbox editor enabled macros - gives me so much flexibility in terms of placong the interactive elements in between the paragprahs.

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Social Media and SEO

Twitter, latest picasa uploads (fully integrated with my Windows Phone 7) and youtube videos. Check out /photo-albums/. Cleaner structure, no additional references to some javascripts files automatically added by some 3rd party plugins. Custom sitemap from which I can exclude any page I want.

Row by Row Design

Full flexibility and custom page look with only 1 template? Yep, each page is basically a generic template to which I apply different rows.

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No going out, no weekends for last 3 weeks (will catch up next week in Barcelona) - still I think it was well worth it! :)

And finally, you're more than welcome to try out the chat facility below. ;D

Tagged: data presentation  umbraco  umbraco comparison