I started blogging on the Dropit Labs blog about a year ago, and I have kind of gotten used to it. But since I no longer work at Dropit, and thus am unable to keep writing there, I felt the need to create another place to write my posts about web development. The simple solution was obviously to start my own blog, and this is the result! Since I didn’t want to start all empty, I have copied most of my posts on the labs blog (except for a few that was only about Dropit stuff).
I have decided to run this blog on Subtext, but the choice was not easy, I can tell you! I knew that I wanted to host the blog myself, and not use a hosted blog engine like Wordpress or Blogger, since I want to be able to tweak the blog. I also made the pragmatic decision that the engine had to be written in C#, to lower my bar for actually modifying the code. I definitely did not want it to be written in PHP, because that really makes my skin crawl.
So basically, I had to look for a good .net blog platform, that was also open source. Some research (let’s call it research, but it was really just googling) yielded four candidates: BlogEngine.NET, dasBlog, AtomSite and Subtext. Initially, I though AtomSite looked very promising, especially as it is written in ASP.NET MVC, which I really like. Unfortunately I found it still lacking a bit too many features. BlogEngine.NET was the platform we used for the labs blog, and although that worked out ok, I thought it would be more fun to try something else. I wasn’t 100% happy with it anyway. So basically it came down to dasBlog or Subtext, and in the end, I just felt that Subtext had a little more umpf than dasBlog.
Finally, I just realised that I have mentioned my previous employer no less than 3 times in this post. In the name of fairness I feel compelled to mention my current employer an equal amount of times now. Active Solution. Active Solution. Active Solution.
So, there.
Until next time, I remain your humble servant.