My New Blog - Redux

I started this new blog site about a month ago – my first post was on July 13th, 2008.  I initially decided to use Das Blog as my blogging platform.  My reasons for this choice were quite simple.  I wanted a platform that was based on .NET and was Open Source Licensed so I could extend it as necessary.  Unfortunately, while there are improvements in process, the core DNN Blog module did not meet my needs.

I also wanted a platform that did not require me to add SQL Server to my hosting account so I could sign up for a cheap monthly plan.  Finally, the platform had to support Windows Live Writer.

After a brief review, I came to the conclusion that Das Blog would be able to handle my needs – after all Scott Hanselman is a member of the Das Blog development team and runs his site on it.  After using Das Blog, though for a few weeks, I have run into a few issues. 

I am not a designer, and I was looking for a theme for my site.  I was underwhelmed by the choices available.  I decided to start out with the Voidclass theme and see if I could tweak it for my needs.  It has a major deficiency of being a variable width theme which became a challenge for me with “pre-formatted” code and text wrapping around images, which caused issues depending on the users screen resolution.

Another issue was that DasBlog uses only one variable – category - for taxonomy, whereas many other platforms use both hierarchical categories and tags (or keywords), and after a few posts I found this to be a drawback in organizing my content..

Finally, Das Blog seems to be showing its age, and I couldn’t find good support for new “technologies” like, for instance, LightBox – for displaying images.

None of these issues were mission-critical, but I decided to do some more research.  I have for a few months now been a subscriber to Mads Kristensen’s blog - .NET slave.  Mads is the creator of BlogEngine.NET.  I knew this was an ASP.NET based blogging platform, but for some reason had not seriously considered it during my initial review – probably as I assumed it was SQL Server based.

One day last week in the course of researching “Lightbox” extensions for Windows Live Writer, as I was thinking of creating my own extension for Das Blog, I found a post by Peter Provost, where he discussed moving his blog from Das Blog to BlogEngine.NET for many of the same reasons I had.

So, here we are.  I decided to move, before my blog become too big and over the weekend I moved to the latest version of BlogEngine.NET.  It is a native ASP.NET 2.0 application, written in C#, rather than a port of another platform or a fork.  It uses a similar provider model to DNN for data access and has both an XML provider and a SQL Server provider. 

It is hosted on codeplex, and the team seems to be releasing every six weeks or so.  The theme I am using is based on a standard theme, available for download from the software’s main site. (see credits at bottom of page)  The theme looks good to my design-challenged eyes and I have tweaked it with some icons from www.FamFamFam.com. In addition I have added the Lightbox 2 extension, which I will be using on my image-heavy travelogues – most of which I have not ported across yet – as I need to resize the images.