Hawk Notes, Volume 1

This is the first in a series of blog posts about Hawk, the engine that powers this site. My plan is to make a post like this for every significant update to the site. We'll see well that plan works.

• I just pushed out a new version of Hawk on my website. The primary feature of this release is support for ASP.NET 5 Beta 7. I also published the source code up on GitHub. Feedback welcome!
• As I mentioned in my post on Edge.js, the publishing tools for Hawk is little more than duct tape and bailing wire at this point. Eventually, I'd like to have a dedicated tool, but for now it's a manual three step process:
  1. Run the PublishDraft to publish a post from my draft directory to a local git repo of all my content. As part of this, I update some of the metadata and render the markdown to HTML.
  2. Run my WritePostsToAzure Custom Command to publish posts from my local git repo to Azure. I have a blog post on my custom command infrastructure in the works.
  3. Trigger a content refresh via an unpublished URL.
• I need to trigger a content refresh because Hawk loads all of the post metadata from Azure on startup. The combined metadata for all my posts is pretty small - about 2/3 of a megabyte stored on disk as JSON. Having the data in memory makes it easy to query as well as support multiple post repositories ( Azure storage and the file system).
• I felt comfortable publishing the Hawk source code now because I added a secret key to the data refresh URL. Previously, the refresh URL was unsecured. I didn't think giving random, anonymous people on the Interet the ability to kick off a data refresh was a good idea, so I held off publishing source until I secured that endpoint.
• Hawk caches blog post content and legacy comments in memory. This release also adds cache invalidation logic so that everything gets reloaded from storage on data refresh, not just the blog post metadata.
• I don't understand what the ASP.NET team is doing with the BufferedHtmlContent class. In beta 7 it's been moved to the Common repo and published as source. However, I couldn't get it to compile because it depends on an internal [NotNull] attribute. I decided to scrap my use of BufferedHtmlContent and built out several classes that implement IHtmlContent directly instead. For example, the links at the bottom of my master layout are rendered by the SocialLink class. Frankly, I'm not sure if rolling your own IHtmlContent class for snippet of HTML code you want to automate is a best practice. It seems like it's harder than it should be. It feels like ASP.NET needs a built-in class like BufferedHtmlContent, so I'm not sure why it's been removed.