I am not sure if there is anyone out there who really cares about the technology behind this site, but if there is, this post is for you. I designed this site using ASP.NET running on a Windows 2003 server with MS SQL Server 2005 for the database. The server is housed at Cafe Luwak where I have a T1 line coming into the restaurant. In my gut I felt this kind of initiative should be done on the open source model, Linux Apache PHP, and MySQL for example. My reasoning for using .NET is that besides owning a restaurant, I also work as a computer consultant (my restaurant doesn't quite pay the bills), and ASP.NET is one of the technologies I am trying to learn for my job. That being said, I learned a lot from this project.

One of my goals for this site was to make it easy to reuse. We chose the domains buylocalmichigan.com and buylocalmichigan.org because we could prefix any host we wanted on the front. If you go to ypsi.buylocalmighigan.com you come to this site, but if you type annarbor.buylocalmichigan.com, you come to this site, but it looks different. Lisa from Think Local First wanted the Ann Arbor site to have the pledge and view pledge sections, but the rest of the information was on her site, so all she needed was a link from the main menu. When you go to the Ann Arbor site you are actually going to the same site as the Ypsi site. When the pages load, the incoming url is checked, and a site ID is assigned which tells the website which theme to present to user. The themes are made up of different master pages, CSS Style sheets, and Skins for the .NET controls. So if you are coming to the Ypsi site, you get the nice red banner that Linette created and a full menu on the left side (including the blog you are reading now), but if you go to the Ann Arbor site, you get the green and orange colors and a limited menu on the left. This is all controlled by the themes and the data that you see in the center section is controlled by the website id that is sent to the database. The database server uses one set of tables for the data, so pledges from Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor are all in one table and are distinguished by the website ID.

Due to time constraints there are a number of items that aren't as dynamic as I would like, but it would be easy to update if the need arises. If someone in our group lived in Belleville for example, and they wanted to do the same thing we are doing. We could have a copy of this site setup just by creating a color theme, a couple of images, and some data. The blog is the only portion of the site that isn't easily moveable. I didn't write that, so it is just incorporated into the site.

If you have any questions about the site or suggestions for improvements, let me know by posting a comment here.