Usability Luddite

I rewrote the Charlottesville Contradance website a couple of years ago when I was learning .NET. I found that .NET is a good platform in some ways, and a weak platform in others.

What is good is that I was able to easily place widgets on the screen and associate them with data. I created a fairly rich site (for the time!) without learning a thing about JavaScript. It also has “master pages”, so you can create a template for a number of pages without having to repeat the same HTML over and over.

What is bad is pretty much the same thing: I was an applications programmer and I was able to create the site without having to change my paradigm and without having to learn much about HMTL, CSS, or JavaScript. Some of the .NET pages I created tended to be pretty heavy. What is also bad is that the site needs to be hosted by a Windows server, and that limits your choices.

The entire schedule is driven by a set of XML files. My thinking was that I’d like to keep an entire mirror of the site on my computer and just FTP it up. That way, I can’t lose data if the ISP goes under. In retrospect, I think the way to go is to use a database, but have backup procedures in place.

One of these days I’ll rewrite the site in Ruby on Rails.

Tags: Contradance, internet, Rails

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 22nd, 2009 at 9:40 pm and is filed under Contradance, Internet Programming, Programming, Rails. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.