I have seen previously discussions about breadcrumbs, mostly about adding a navigational guide to a website.  I've always thought that a breadcrumb wasn't necessary for BlogEngine because there just isn't that many deep pages on my blog.  I did a little investigation and discovered that there is actually two different types of breadcrumbs:  Positional and Historical.  What's the difference?  Well Webmonkey describes it best:

There are two main ways of approaching breadcrumbs. The first is the kind left by Hansel and Gretel, which is of the form, 'I went here, then here, then here, then here'. I've labelled this kind of breadcrumb, 'History Breadcrumbs', because they show a browsing history.

The second is of the form, 'I'm at this page, which is part of this section, which is part of this section'. I've called this kind 'Position Breadcrumbs' because they show the visitors current location in the site.

A little more digging found that some people completely reject the notion of a historical breadcrumb because the Back button and the History cache provides all you would ever need.  I think insisting that breadcrumbs not be used for history is a bit drastic.

So why would I consider adding a breadcrumb to my site?  Well an article posted by Kenneth Dreyer outlines the usefullness of the breadcrumb:

Right after launching I added a measurement tool to it, to monitor the usage. People started using the breadcrumbs instantly, and what surprised me the most was that 40% of my users that where online on my site for more than 60 seconds and browsed more than three sites, used the breadcrumb to navigate.

If you liked reading the article by Kenneth then you will love the exhaustive article by Usability News.  A bit too much for me...

So armed with this information I decided that I could appreciate the use of a historical breadcrumb (how about you?) .  I decided to find a way to provide this feature for BlogEngine.Net.  I located some javascript from Webmonkey that provides this functionality by adding a javascript file and some script to your page.  I thought about just using this but decided that a user control would be a better way to provide this service.  So after some testing and such I finished the control and added it to my site.  Notice how it shows the pages you have visited.

If you think this is useful and want to add it to your site it's pretty easy.  First download the code from my site and add the HistoricalBreadcrumb.ascx file into your ~/User Control folder.  Then you need to add the following to the top of the page that you want to display the control (for me it's ~/themes/standard/site.master):

<%@ Register src="~/User controls/historicalBreadcrumb.ascx" TagName="Breadcrumb" TagPrefix="bc" %>

Finally you need to add the control where you want it to be displayed:

<bc:Breadcrumb ID="Breadcrumb" runat="server" />

Please let me know if you find this usefull...

HistoricalBreadcrumb.zip (1.27 kb)