How to integrate a blog engine into an asp.net mvc site?

Question

My current site (VisualHint) uses ExpressionEngine and allows me to have the basic ecommerce I need inside a templated web site containing several blogs (one is the main blog, the others are testimonials, announcements).

But I need more to handle licenses and subscriptions, so I decided to port the site to asp.net mvc. My only concern right now is the integration with a .net blog. Whatever the solution, I want to be able to show on the main page some excerpts of my main blog (what used to be blogs before, like testimonials, can now be sequential entries in my database).

So let's say I choose blogengine.net for instance. Can I extract these informations and show them on my mvc web page? Which .net blog would you try first to achieve such a goal?

Answer 1

Every blog server I know of supports an Atom/RSS feed with extracts from the most recent posts. Read the feed and put that on your site home.

Answer 2

I agree with @Craig to try using an RSS feed reader (perhaps a user control/widget), unless you need the blog fully integrated with the rest of your site. Depending on how complex you need the blog to be, writing one can be very simple and might be easier to integrate into your existing infrastructure than trying to port in a larger app like blogengine.net.

If the blog is a separate entity/website, though, definitely just rip from the rss feed into your custom container.