WordPress Is A DUMPSTER FIRE - Build A Blog In Blazor!

I have been fed up with working with WordPress hosted on Amazon light sale and then I had this realization that I'm my really adop net content creator unless I have my own blog hosted in a Net Framework environment hi my name is Nick centino and I'm a principal software engineering manager at Microsoft in this video I'm going to introduce you to Steven gel's Blazer blog engine and for some background I've been live streaming about my migration from WordPress over to this Blazer blog engine the different steps I've had to take along the way and I wanted to make this video to introduce you to the different features in this blog engine now this will be a video series so I will go more in depth into these different features that we'll walk through but this video will serve as a high level for the features that are available at this moment if that sounds interesting just a reminder to subscribe to the channel and check out that pin comment for my courses on dome train now let's go jump over to GitHub and check out this repository all right so Steven's blog engine is here on GitHub link.net blog I will have a link below for you to check that out and this is a totally open- Source MIT licens Blazer blog engine and it does have a bunch of features that can get you up and running honestly if you download this thing build it in visual studio and press play it just runs locally perfectly and you can truly just start adding blog posts in your local test environment so it's very simple to use I love that it's basically just plug andplay and basically anytime that I was putting around with it having trouble it's because I was messing things up on my own so out of the box it does work really well so I want to jump over to Steven's blog here so this is Steven's blog running his Blazer blog engine when we go to check out mine you'll see that it's basically the same exact style it's just that he has different theming obviously different content um you'll see a picture of him and on mine it will look slightly different obviously because I'm not Steven but the layout and everything that we see here is very much the same so we can click on blog articles we can see that it's in markdown it has uh you know code that you can embed directly it's awesome now if we jump over to M you'll see that it's very similar in terms of the title bar and everything I've customized this in my own Fork of the repository I have a newsletter sign up section as well and then a little bit about me and then again the posts that are listed here now these posts look a little bit different they have a special border on them and I'll touch on that in just a moment but otherwise we can go over to the post section and I can click on post and then I have this big Archive of all the blogs that I've written and if we pick something I don't know from 2023 we can see that I have blog articles as well with the code embed here it's truly just out of the box worked really awesome back to what this blog engine supports now I think it's pretty cool if we jump down to the documentation here so we have authorization so U this might seem pretty simple on the surface obviously but if you are running a website and you need to be able to edit the blog post add blog posts you don't want to have that exposed to everyone obviously so the authorization module allows you to customize that you can use off zero you can use Azure for this as well uh I did start with Azure on mine I have moved to Au zero I will make a video on that so you can see how that all works with ozero uh comments I have not hooked up comments but it does have uh plug-in ability to work with different uh comment providers so those are hosted entirely separately I think discuss is one of them it's spelled kind of funny but that is a third party thing that you can hook up to have comment support on your blog post the storage provider is a extensible way that you can pick a different storage mechanism so out of the box it will just work with a sqlite database super handy if you're trying to run this stuff locally just to test it out and that way it will just use a database it actually uses an in-memory sqlite database but it's important to note and I actually talk with Stephen about this it's not just a fake database like it's a API that looks like a database but it's just a dictionary or something like that it truly is running sqlite in an inmemory database now it's awesome because you can pick the different storage providers so in my own deployment I have hooked this up to Azure and it has a mySQL database running there so very configurable very easy to do and I will again make a video on how to do this in my case using Azure with mySQL the media upload is actually something that I talked to step about as well and uh this is coming from the live streams so I thought that it was really awesome that Steph took feedback on this because in my use case I was migrating from WordPress right so coming from WordPress over to this blog engine I have a bunch of content I have a bunch of posts so when it came to the media upload I needed to make sure that if I had content uh online in terms of pictures and stuff I could move that over to somewhere and have it all be reusable now in my case I wasn't sure if I was going to have to deal with broken links on the media I really didn't want to have to worry about that so Stephen came up with a way that I can essentially do most of that migration but it does work with Azure blob storage which is super cool you can hook up CDN on top of that so A content delivery Network and again I will make a video on that because that's what I'm leveraging for my own blog now the search engine optimization settings uh I think from my perspective uh when I go to contribute back to this blog engine that's what I want to try and help contribute to I think there are things that I was leveraging in WordPress in terms of plugins that's honestly probably why I ran into such a big problem with WordPress at the end of the day was because I had so many plugins trying to help do certain things that it really just made it completely unwieldly but I do want to contribute back for some different search engine optimization uh Concepts uh especially in terms of structured data to give back to the search crawler Bots like the Google bot to be able to pick up things like if you had a Blog that you wanted to post recipes on you can structure data such that uh Google will pick that up so there's some things that I'm considering writing to give back to this and I think it's going to be pretty awesome now jumping over to some Advanced features Just a Touch on this short codes is again another feature that I suggested to Steven and he went ahead and implemented it right away I thought this was super cool that he did this the idea behind a short code is it comes from me using Wordpress and it's the idea that you can have like these reusable uh components for a lack of better word so for example if I wanted to write blog articles and reference you know either a course that I've created or some digital product and I want to be able to reuse that I can use a short code and then when the page goes to get endered it will replace the short code with my little advertisement or digital product or even in my case I have a sign off where I have a newsletter sign up and some affiliations so I will show you that in just a moment and then something that I have not used that I just found as I was going to make this video is this critical CSS generator so this is interesting I will definitely play around with it but uh the concept here is that you can get more optimization out of the page load so again if you are taking blogging seriously and you're trying to make sure that you can uh get uh indexed accordingly and you want to have uh basically a good user experience there's a lot of different optimizations to look at I am certainly not an expert at running a super awesome high performance blog because if you've visited my website over the past couple of years you'd probably say Nick I know that you're not good at this and that's why I am trying to make sure that I can have input into this kind of stuff and have some more control over it now before I jump back over to my blog to show off some of the features one more thing I wanted to call out in terms of customization if I scroll back up here Steven actually added a members only configuration and again this was a suggestion I had because when I'm migrating from my own blog on WordPress I did make sure that my newsletter I have all of the newsletter articles that I've ever sent out I have them on my own blog I do post them on substack they do get emailed out but I want to make sure that I always own my own content and that way if I ever have an issue with substack or any other platform I'm using I can say no worries I own my content and that means though because my newsletter with substack gets archived after a month and then there's a pay wall for the older issues I wanted to make sure that I could maintain that pay wall just like I was doing on WordPress so Steven did add a membersonly uh capability so people can have accounts on the website and then I can restrict certain access to different blogs that I have now if we go back to my blog jumping over here if I go back to the homepage you'll notice like I said at the beginning of this video These gold bars around here right so if I go to read the whole article I am logged in so you'll notice that I can edit uh we can see the whole article so this is a newsletter article that I have if I go back up and press log out though once we're logged out now we see the picture for the article we get this Banner that says it's only available for members and then on my Fork I've also customized it to have uh this little newsletter subscription because if you want to see my payal articles and you want to see the archive of them this is where you would go to make sure that that can happen now in my own flavor of this Fork I do have pictures added at the top of articles that was my own little twist that I wanted to do on this um I do have uh some different landing pages up at the top so for example I have my newsletter section where you can read some information about the newsletter before uh going over to substack to sign up um I have a ches tab up at the top so if you're interested in my Dome train courses this is a spot on my own site where I have them listed out and then they link over to dome train where you can actually go to purchase them and then I have a tab for digital products these digital products are uh generally just like really simple things so I have an ebook I have a PowerPoint presentation on plugin architecture that's absolutely free to download but if you navigate to products it will actually take you to gumroad so totally external website to go check that out and then I'm going to tailor this page so this is the about me page that comes stock uh obviously we can plug in our own information here but I'll probably switch this up a little bit um because for me I don't necessarily need my about me page to kind of read like a a resum where I'm listing out my skills and stuff um I don't really have that purpose so I will probably switch this up to call out different projects and things I'm working on and almost read more like a story with some links to some other things but in general this is an awesome opportunity for me personally to switch away from WordPress I'm very excited to start using Blazer um I do have my site up and running so like you can see here right this is the live site it's no longer on WordPress it truly is running on the Blazer blog engine from Steven so I'm super pumped about that and I have a little bit more to go so I will be making videos on the different features that are down here in the documentation I will also talk about the members only Fe features and then I will also mention uh some other things that I'll be building on top of my blog that I needed functionality for one such thing will be Google analytics tracking so I will have follow-up videos on all of those things and when they're ready and uploaded you can start watching them up here thanks and I'll see you next time