I’ve known I should be blogging on my sites for years. Recently a friend of mine finally motivated me to just do it. I really wanted to integrate the blog into my websites instead of having some disconnected look. This was difficult, as most blogging software is PHP based, and my websites are generally ASP.NET based. I looked into some .NET solutions such as BlogEngine.NET, but based on some forum posts, it didn’t appear it would integrate with my master pages very well anyways.
What I ended up doing, was creating a simple master-page based ASP.NET file in my ASP.NET project with the appropriate pieces needed for a basic WP Theme. Then, on application startup in the global.asax file, I retrieve it and write it out as index.php in the appropriate theme directory for WP. This means as I change my website’s master file, the theme will automatically be updated… The only bad part of this, is any dynamic portions of my master page will be ‘burned in’ at application startup… The master pages for my product pages aren’t generally too dynamic, so this wasn’t a significant limiting factor for me, but it may be for some.