blogengine

Up until now, I’ve been using BlogEngine.Net as my blogging platform, and up until now I’ve been relatively happy with using it. One of the major drivers for me as a “Microsoft” person was to use something that is based on Microsoft technology – BlogEngine.Net is based (as the name suggests) on the .Net framework. I’m much happier these days writing limited amounts of C#.Net than I am with PHP.

Shhhh, don’t tell the spam-bots, but after a blissful month of having broken the comments system and not having enough time to fix it, I’ve finally got round to doing it! Comments will now work without errors - and the spam-bots should have a hard time getting past reCaptcha too! At some point I’ll update to 1.6.1, but for now, I’m glad it’s working again!

I’ve just upgraded to BE.Net 1.6, and I thought I’d migrate to GoDaddy’s IIS 7 servers at the same time. The theory is that this would be a an easy migration and I’d have the weekend to iron out any bugs. Not so. After testing on my local IIS 7 and working perfectly, I uploaded the updates to my live blog and hit the “Migrate to IIS 7” button, which promises it will be completed in 24h.

Just a quick note to mark the fact that I’ve updated the look and feel of the blog - hopefully with a bit more space and cleaner lines. It’s still teething, so report any bugs you see! I’ve had a bit of a cleanup of the categories to remove some of the less “category” like ones - they were being a bit blurred with the tags. Lastly, I’m really quite amazed to say that my blog is now well over 100 visitors a day on a weekday, so thank you for visiting!

I’ve just added some code syntax highlighting to this blog using SyntaxHighlighter and a great how-to article by Scott Dougherty this means that any code I post should look like this: public static string SayHello(string name){ return String.Format("Hello, {0}!", name);} There are a few bugs at the moment, one being that tiny_mce is stripping linebreaks from the code posting (just a minor one) and the theme somehow removes the line numbers, but I’m sure I’ll find a way around them…somehow.

One of my unpublished gripes with the DotNetNuke blog was that it was a pain to make work with WLW. One of the cool things with BE.Net is that it does work with WLW, not only that but it works well. Setup was a breeze and within 2 minutes I’m now writing my first post, including tags and categories (hit F2 if you’re trying to do that in WLW). Now this is cool!

Well my first real post on BlogEngine.Net is…about BlogEngine.Net! After running the import program from my old DotNetNuke blog I found that the importer had worked, but that the blog entries had not shown up. This was because the cache that BE.Net uses for the XML data files. Since I’m on a shared hosting I couldn’t just run an IISReset.exe, so I obviously needed a work around, and here it is:

I miss WordPress. I miss the fact that it would save my work periodically, and that if my session timed out while the I was writing a blog, it would be there when I logged back in as an unpublished daft. I miss having my categorised posts. I miss having tags to tell me what I’ve written about. Even Google seems to prefer my old blog, old pages that don’t exist are returned where these ones sit in anonymity.