A few short years ago your website could stand alone, an island in the sea of information washing around the Internet. Now, with the advent of web 2.0, social media, mobile internet, etc., your website can no longer survive alone. In fact, it would be foolish to ignore the latest technologies and try to do so. Indeed, these days some websites are becoming little more than a central point that lists links to online social media services.

Here is a list of the online services, most of them free, that I use on my website and that I find essential. It's not a comprehensive list of all the web services out there by any means, and there are several that I use but haven't integrated with my site yet, such as posterous and flickr, which aren't on the list. Anyway, in no particular order, here goes;

So, you've got two great things, the IntenseDebate commenting software and the BlogEngine.NET blogging software, and you want to combine them to make something greater than the sum of its parts. Here's how it's done.

1. Pop over to IntenseDebate and get the JavaScript code they provide.
2. Open up the file 'post.aspx', which is in the root folder of your blog.
3. Disable the built in commenting system by setting the 'CommentView' usercontrol to 'visible = false' like so;
   
   <uc:CommentView ID="CommentView1" runat="server" Visible="false" />
   
   
4. Paste the IntenseDebate code below the disabled usercontrol, wrapping it in an 'If' statement so the code is only rendered if comments are enabled for the post;

<% if (Post.IsCommentsEnabled)
{ %>

       <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
     var idcomments_acct = 'YOUR ACCOUNT';
var idcomments_post_id;
var idcomments_post_url;
</script>

<script type='text/javascript' src='http://www.intensedebate.com/js/genericCommentWrapperV2.js'></script>

  <% } %>

Voila! An ASP.NET powered blog with a web 2.0 commenting system.

 

Here are a few little tips and tricks I've come across while writing for my blog:

1) If you get stuck and spend ages trying to finish a blog post it's usually because there's something fundamentally wrong with the premise of the article. It can takes ages to see what it is. So if you do get stuck, just leave it alone and come back to it the next day. Hopefully the fog will have cleared and you'll be able to pinpoint the problem.