Making a Website with ASP.NET and HTML

Microsoft provides Visual Web Developer Express as a free download to design websites built on their .NET technology. .NET is nothing more than a common set of functions for interacting with a user and ASP.NET implements it for the Web via Microsoft’s Active Server Pages (ASP). These create the HTML from which a browser, like Internet Explorer, builds a Web page.

OK, that's the jargon. The bottom line is: you can cut all that crap and just use Visual Web Developer (VWD) as an HTML editor. It does some of the tedious typing for you by filling in text it knows you'll need and even makes it XHTML-compliant. And if you want to try any of the fancy stuff in .NET, like master pages and reusable code, it’s there for you.

I've already hinted at using this to design a website and the resulting mish-mash appears at my birding/writing/programming pages. Yes, it looks like I’m not going down the Drupal route: I’m the sort of control freak that likes to programme as close to bare metal (or silicon) as possible.

And really, VWD is simple, for simple pages. It’s only when you start pushing the technology that the learning curve becomes as vertical as the brick wall against which you feel you're banging your head. You have to try the whistles and bells one at a time.

Most frustrating recently has been CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). This is supposed to be the XHTML way to go: it separates style from content, presentation from the actual words. However, something as simple as centring images seems to require such an inversion of the thought processes that Einstein would struggle with it. This is not VWD’s fault: it merely conforms to the coming standards.

It did have one big roadblock when testing the website locally, which might drive the less tenacious away. So, here it is, cleared: Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage.

PS. I would never advocate not using the <p> element to mark up an HTML paragraph. After all, a paragraph is a paragraph, right? But look in your newspaper. Is there a space between paragraphs? Check the latest, or any, Harry Potter. Spaces there? The Bible? Goddammit, even an HTML reference book? Spaces between paragraphs? No.

Then along comes HTML itself. “I know: let's stick a space in between paragraphs.” Fucking brilliant, mate. So, here's a nasty, but CSS-compliant, way to remove the space and indent the way it used to be:
p {text-indent:1.2em; margin-top:-1em;}
p.scene {text-indent:0em; margin-top:0em;}
Now just add class=”scene” to the first paragraph of each piece. Scrivens!

Website Design

Before I launch into my seabird volunteer adventures, I have a postscript to the domain hosting saga.

I registered theandygibb.com with GoDaddy, who give you all sorts of freebies for your £6.40 a year. For instance, I had found with pokerbird.net that I could redirect it to this blog without having to host the domain elsewhere. (I also bought and redirected thepokerbird.com just to get round the non-availability of pokerbird.com. Again, I am the Pokerbird!)

In fact, GoDaddy offer free hosting and a slew of CMSs (Content Management Systems), which was perfect because I wanted to use Drupal. So, theandygibb got a Unix hosting account. Problem: all the nice add-on applications, which include the CMSs, are only free for a paid hosting plan. Well, three quid a month isn't going to break the bank but I still had one other avenue to explore.

When I got back from my world travels, I toyed with the idea of returning to computing and tinkered with Microsoft’s ASP.NET. I played enough to supplement my existing HTML and build a half-decent website reasonably quickly. I'd try that.

Hell’s teeth: I'd signed for a Unix account, to get the Drupal. I hadn’t got Windows, which runs .NET. (You see how this stuff can drive you round the bend?)

Nothing daunted, I set theandygibb.net up for Windows and shan't bore you with the trials of using ASP and Visual Web Developer, except to assure you that they were manifold. You can see the result by following the link. Pretty kludgy, huh? And with a GoDaddy banner across the top. I should have known.

So it looks I’m having to pay to get Drupal on theandygibb.com but I’ll let that idea marinate a while.

Internet Domain Name Registration

This is off-topic but semi-related. I've been trying to make a website that is more inclusive of what I do than just this blog. It’s bad enough already that I've set the Pokerbird up to cover two topics and I don't want to dilute it further with other interests. So, I've spent the last few days laying the foundations for a portal domain, one of whose rooms would be this blog.

First, I needed a name and that took me into the murky world of registrations, bidding and auctions. One obvious target was pokerbird.com, which was for sale on Sedo. You can generally find that out just by typing the URL into a browser. Sedo seemed kosher enough, so I signed up and discovered that the starting price was $100 to transfer the site.

Hmm. Seventy quid, eh? More than I wanted to pay but still not excessive. I bid and less than 24 hours later got a counter-offer from the vendor of £300. So, what was the deal with a starting price? He further said that he had offers over £300. Well, dummy, take them. What's the point of allowing me to undercut them? Two weeks later I notice that the domain is still for sale. Like I said: a murky world.

Just to ring-fence him I registered pokerbird.net, .org and .info for less than £30 at GoDaddy, the world’s biggest domain registrar. In the Web landscape that put me in the suburbs compared with the shiny .com downtown of corporate glass and steel tower blocks. But, hey, the .net neighbourhood in particular is up and coming.

So much for headquartering this blog. I had a bigger problem with my own personal portal. I have a famous name, so andygibb.everything is taken. Even without an illustrious namesake I’m sure few personal domains are untenanted for anybody. Try it for yourself. Actually, the Andy Gibb people had had to settle for .net. I’m sure whoever’s sitting on .com is a relative of my pokerbird.com friend. Anyway, joebloggs.com in general is out.

Except that for days the answer was staring me in the face at GoDaddy before I twigged. They love to sell domains, so much that they present a list of choices close to what you have requested. These include .net, .org, et al, suffixed domains like andygibbstore and prefixes like my, new and the.

The – theandygibb.com. Aren’t I the Andy Gibb? Not just any old Andy Gibb, not even that one. The one.

I snapped it up. Job done. Well, not quite. Now I have to create the website and that's a whole other story.