A lot of people have requested that we added AJAX to certain parts of BlogEngine.NET, so we did.

Because of the rule of not using third party components, it is implemented using the build-in client-callback feature with some custom JavaScript. All in all very few lines of code was needed.

The calendar widget to the right on this site is now ajaxified for a more smooth navigation between months. The postback reloaded the page every time you navigated to a new month and that was not very cool. The performance is actually pretty descent I think.

The comments have also been AJAX enabled, so that when you write a comment, there is no postback anymore. It makes sure that the browser supports AJAX before enabling it, so that it falls back to normal postback behaviour on old browsers. The invisible CAPTCHA still works when the browser doesn’t support AJAX. I have never seen ajaxified comments on other blogs, so it might be an exclusive feature of BlogEngine.NET.

Unfortunately I cannot share the bits with you because CodePlex is having problems, so there is no access to the source code. CodePlex say they will be back online within 96 hours. In the mean time you can try out the new calendar widget and the AJAX comments by posting one.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo just released the first result from the joint venture sitemap protocol. For a while now, you have been able to log in to Google’s webmaster tools and from there specify your sitemap XML file. By doing so, you tell Google the location of all the pages on your site so that you make sure that everything gets crawled and indexed.

Yahoo and Microsoft wanted the same functionality but instead of creating their own format, the joined forces with Google to create a standardized format. Now Ask.com announces they also will support the format.

The result is a set of extensions but most importantly the ability of autodiscovery, so you no longer have to manually log in and update the sitemap. Because all search engines support the robots.txt document, they decided to let you specify the path to the sitemap there.

Basically, you just add a single line to the robots.txt that specifies the absolute path to the sitemap. Here is an example from my robots.txt:

sitemap: http://blog.madskristensen.dk/sitemap.axd

If you use BlogEngine.NET, the sitemap is called /sitemap.axd.