I am ready to say goodbye to my hand-crafted blogging engine that served me well from 2012-2019 in favour of this website run by ghost publishing platform.

My old site has been archived here: https://old.mustak.im . It's running on a free tire azure app service. Nothing new will be posted there.

I have been wanting to re-write my website using ASP.NET Core so I can deploy this to my kubernetes cluster and get rid of the Windows VPS I've been running for many years. I have migrated all of my projects to cross-platform .NET Core except my own website. The reason is not entirely due to lack of time I have nowadays. Read on to find out why.

For now, let us say goodbye to this - here are some screenshots for me to remember. Some of them are never before shared photo of the back panel.

Why didn't I just migrate to .NET Core?

The reason I didn't simply rewrite the website using x-platform .NET Core isn't due to lack of time. When I wrote the blogging engine back in 2012 there wasn't many fast/bloat-free blogging platform available to fit my purpose. Things have changed quite a bit in 2019 - there are many blogging platforms that I can just configure and they just work.

I still wanted to give my website a second chance by using mono in docker - however since the site uses SQL Compact Edition database, the app couldn't run under Linux due to some missing dependency. It turned out SQL CE had some dependency on Windows operating system. So that was the final nail in the coffin.

I wanted to do minimum work possible to get my site up and running fast - so I choose the simplest blogging platform, deployed to kubernetes and manually copied old blog posts. 🎊

Here is the About Me from my old site

About my old site

This was copied from the About this site section of my old website

This site has been written from scratch using ASP.NET MVC soon after  the framework was released. I have been planning to rewrite this using ASP.NET Core for quite sometime now, but haven't had a chance due to commitments at  work and other more interesting projects I'm working on the limited time  I get during the weekends and evenings.

Thanks to all the following developers for the libraries I have used while building this website.

• AIML Chatbot, The chatbot used in the contact page utilizes the wonderful work by Dr. Richard S. Wallace.
• TweetSharp by Daniel Crenna and Jason Diller
• CommonMark.NET by Kārlis Gaņģis
• HtmlAgilityPack by Simon Mourrier, Jeff Klawiter and Stephan Grell

It's been coded in C# using SQL CE Database. Microsoft Team Foundation services is in use for source control, Continuous Integration and Deployment.