Building a blog in Kentico Cloud - Part 3

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This third post in my series that explores some of the core capabilities of Kentico Cloud based on short pomodoro-size bursts of effort. This post explores RSS feeds and sitemaps as well as correcting the mime type of media files.

So this week I was able to find time to do three more things with my blog. Namely that I managed to:

• Change the content into markdown
• Add an RSS feed and google sitemap
• Correct the mime type of images served from the cloud

I wasn't really expecting to get quite so far with so little time to spend; I fully anticipated my lack of MVC knowledge to give me more issues than it did. That being said - I'm sure that there are many better way to achieve what I have here in MVC.

Moving to markdown

Quite early on, I realised that I wanted more control than the rich text field allowed - especially when trying to add code snippets. I had come up with an over-engineered method of including text files and resolving some secret markup on the fly to inject my code. Then I realised that I was drafting up my posts in Trello using markdown and that it is pretty flexible. Using markdown would make my life simpler so I could just use the text field and then parse it inside the web application.

I used Markdown 2.1.0 as my markdown processor and added a simple function in my application to prepare the content as follows:

My reason for doing this is to give me a little more control over the content that I can enter. I don't doubt that the Kentico Cloud team will continue to enhance the platform, but for now, what I need/want to be able to do is add richer content than the current toolbar allows.

Also, I'm considering moving to Markdig, but i prefer the maturity of the package I'm using.

Adding RSS and Google Sitemap

These guys were pretty straight forward from the Kentico Cloud viewpoint. I just needed to go grab all of my content that I wanted in the feed. This gave me a simple RSS controller as follows:

The RSSResult was a custom FileResult that simply serializes the supplied SyndicationFeed as follows:

Ta-dah! That's it really; the sitemap works in the same way. What's nice here from the Kentico Cloud view is using the API to filter down to the content that I care about easily

Correcting the media mime types

As I mentioned in my last post on the topic, the mime type for all of my media files seems to be application/octetstream. For the act of serving a page to a web browser, this appears to be fine. If you're trying to implement something like twitter cards, then this is more of an issue.

In addition, if you - like me - want to use something like CoudFlare CDN, then you need to serve the images from your own domain. So I want to figure this out anyway. Keep in mind that the entirety of Kentico Cloud sits behind a CDN, meaning that the API and all of the assets are already available through a global CDN to keep response times to a minimum.

All in, this is more about exploring options in MVC than Kentico Cloud at this point. The process behind deliving the image though my domain is fairly simple:

1. Modify the media/asset URL's when rendering the page
2. Create a new controller/handler to deal with the module URLs and routing
3. Create a content result that streams the asset from Kentico Cloud through to a new FileResult with the correct mime type.

The first thing was to create a FileResult, that would take in the image URL and mime type as follows:

Then, I can create a controller to intercept the image URLs:

I also needed to add this new route to RouteConfig.cs:

and also runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true" in the web.config.

Finally, just a couple of methods/tweaks to allow the image URLs to be modified before the page is served:

and

In hindsight, this might be better as some kind of output filter on the views, but I had 25 minutes to bash this part together - so it'll do for now. I certainly wouldn't call it production ready.

Summary

This week's efforts really were more about a basic tidy-up in order to give me more control of my content and close off some issues that I had found.

What's next?

There are a couple of things on my list to look at next:

1. Start using module content to create related pages/posts and to links series of posts together.
2. Pushing content up into Azure Search in order to provide a search capability across the site for blog posts.