This page is a historical account of the dasBlog documentation site; it is not the project's documentation. The active project and its current documentation are at the DasBlog Core repository.
dasBlog origins
dasBlog was a free, BSD-licensed weblog engine for the .NET Framework provided by newtelligence AG. It said the engine was an evolution of BlogX, initially written by Chris Anderson and contributors. That places the page in an early ASP.NET publishing context: a project needed to explain not only writing posts, but also application setup, navigation, configuration, templates and source structure.
The page also thanked Bryan Bell for themes made available for porting, Pawel Lesnikowski for initial POP3 work, Nikhil Kothari for HtmlFormatter and Charles Cook for an XML-RPC library. The project credited these contributors. None of those people is associated with this independent reference.
A taxonomy of project concerns
The documentation was organized into categories rather than a single linear manual. Its visible sections included Home, Overview, Setup, Navigation, Configuration, Templates and Macros, Code, FAQ and Known Issues. The category rail also exposed Roadmap, Download, Impressum and Mail To Weblog.
- Overview
- Introduced the engine's feature surface.
- Setup
- Explained requirements, procedures, files and directories.
- Navigation
- Covered the application's user-interface elements.
- Configuration
- Described settings and system boundaries.
- Templates and Macros
- Documented the presentation vocabulary used by themes.
- Code
- Provided a map of the C# source.
- FAQ and Known Issues
- Collected recurring questions and planned work.
These historical topics are not current setup directions or a configuration reference. Retired installers, source workspaces, mail addresses and service endpoints are not active.
Documentation categories
Category selection used an ASP.NET page with a query parameter. Feed services lived at separate application endpoints. That structure was normal for a server-rendered application, but it coupled public addresses to implementation names such as page and service extensions. Links to individual categories could remain in other sites long after the application changed.
The category-view and feed services are retired, and no XML service is active.
Documentation as an architecture map
The taxonomy reveals the engine's boundaries. Setup and configuration described deployment state. Navigation and templates described presentation. Code described maintainability. FAQ, known issues and roadmap described project coordination. Download and mail-to-weblog represented distribution and alternate publishing paths. The documentation categories show what maintainers believed users needed to understand.
Reading the taxonomy today
The section list also shows the limits of a category-driven manual. A reader had to infer which sections formed a complete task and whether a known issue changed an earlier instruction. Modern documentation often separates concepts, tasks, reference and troubleshooting more explicitly, but the older taxonomy already contained all four kinds of information in recognizable form.
Read as history, the categories are a concise map of the maintenance burden behind a seemingly simple weblog.
Where the live project is now
The current repository describes DasBlog as a blogging engine built with ASP.NET Core that preserves the essence of the original. It points to its own present documentation and project resources. The maintainer's current DasBlog category records ongoing project work. Those are the appropriate destinations for current information.
For broader historical context, continue with the history of .NET blogging engines. For an architectural explanation of the documentation sections, see themes and templates, publishing APIs and feeds.