OK … I’ve been holding off a few posts because I’ve been working on completely reworking the blog. Here’s what’s new:
BlogEngine.NET: Yes, it’s true. I’ve migrated from dasBlog over to BlogEngine.NET. It was a process, not a happening and it took longer than I would have liked it to. Part of that was because BE was in the process of a new release and I kept moving the versions … and then had to migrate changes as well. There were a few issues that I found in the pre-release builds of v1.5 but the BE team got those ironed out – hopefully some of the patches that I submitted helped out here. So far, my experience with BlogEngine has been very good and I really like working with it and the extra features that it has over dasBlog. First … and this one’s a big part of the reason that I moved … BE uses ASP.NET Master Pages and controls and the like, not a templating engine like dasBlog. Yes, that is very likely due to when each one was first started but I do like master pages and it’s a lot easier to work with. As I’ve dug around more, I also like the way the BE extension mechanism works and the extensibility that it provides. I haven’t done any yet (because I’ve not had the need) but I am using several of the extensions.
New Domain: I know, I know, I broke one of the cardinal rules of Blogging. I’m moving everything over to a new domain (www.devbiker.net) and I’ll be retiring the old one … eventually. The old domain … well, it was hard to remember, too long to type and somewhat unwieldy. The new one is short, sweet and easier to remember. The old domain will, however, still work; it’s currently a host header on this site and, in time, I’ll start changing it to HTTP 301 redirect. Since I’m using FeedBurner, the Feed url won’t change so most (if not all) of the subscribers won’t have a problem. I also did some work to make sure that the dasBlog Url’s migrated over as well … both the dasBlog feed Url as well as the links to individual posts too. For the individual post links, I used Url Routing to “convert” the dasBlog Url for use in BlogEngine.
New Hosting Provider: This has been a tale of woe lately but I think it’s all finally settled. I’ve moved everything over to a provider (KinetikHosts) that is run by a friend of mine.
Now that this is all out of the way, I’ll be publishing the back-logged stuff.