Here she is, and might I say, she is a beaut'. For the last... say a month, I have wanted to do a site update, but wasn't quite sure what route to take. I had started at least five different designs before deciding to take this route. I'm picky.

Now, a few things to consider with my new design. First of all, I'll probably be tweaking a few things in the next month or so as I'm experimenting. There are a few elements on my website that are definitely not going to work with older browsers. As you could probably tell, the header and other graphics are a bit heftier than my last design. Also, I decided to try a route that uses plenty more CSS than tables. The only places tables are used on this design is a couple asp.net controls that utilise them. Otherwise the skeleton is completely css.

I am also running my full-fledged Europa Content Manager. Complete with document share, blogs, page creation, etc etc. Pretty slick!

   As of November 2nd, it is official that Famous Davis is now located at the MinnWest Technology Campus. I probably should have blogged about this earlier, but it seems I've been keeping busy. How is the campus? It's great. I love absolutely everything about the new setup. The architecture is really cool, I now have a window, I work with people I am closest to and the actual work is great. So far, within the building we are located in, it's only us and two other businesses since it's only been open for rent not even a year. It's a huge building, to say the least. I'm unsure of the actual count of rooms, but it has to be up around a hundred. It'll be exciting to see it filled in the near future.

   So far so good, people. Be sure to check out FamousDavispro.com in the near future, as I will be updating a vast majority of it.

More or less, this is me testing my blogging system. I added an Auto-Draft safety protocol similar to what Gmail and Blogger support, in case of a lost connection or failure while writing out your heartfelt e-mail or blog. This is totally AJAX.net material here, provided by the wonderful people over at Microsoft.

Welp, looks like it saved. I'm out!

At first, this project of converting my links sounded very tedious. Initially I was thinking I'd have to write some elaborate routine on publishing an HTML page after writing a blog, similar to how blogger does it. Not only would I have to make an HTML page for each blog, but I would have to update the extra content (such as "last 10 blogs") in case I wanted to archive them, keep tabs on a main page, rss feed, etc etc etc. Didn't sound appetising at all.

Dissapointed and overcome by this method, I set on a search to find a nice and easy route. Lo' and behold, Microsoft never ceases to amaze me. URLmappings totally made my life easier. They allow you to set a sort of virtual path to your page, yet, still taking in querystring information.

For example, the link to my recent blog, "Lucky Man". It's original (and working) path is:

The after effect of URLMappings is as follows:

Sweet, huh? All I had to do was create an XML file that is referencable to my web.config file. For example, I have a file called URLMapping.xml. This contains all my URL Maps. Example:

Now, I reference URLMapping.xml from the Web.Config file of my website:

That's all there is to it! So now when I save a blog, it opens the URLMapping.xml into a Dataset, quick add the links and save it back. Couldn't be easier.