As most of you know I have been working on migrating my blog over to a self-hosted Microsoft.NET powered engine and that moment is finally here.

BlogEngine.NET Subtext 2.0

After looking at a lot of options for blog engines and doing some soul searching I finally settled on BlogEngine.NET (I plan to blog all about the options I looked at later). BE.NET is simple to install, looks clean with its out-of-the-box templates and works greater with Live Writer. I also like the fact that it does not require a SQL Server database to store the blog content and instead uses XML files.

So BlogEngine.net worked great for a few days, but then a big bug hit me hard, duplicate posts via Live Writer. This totally killed it for me so I switched to Phil Haack’s Subtext Blog Engine v2.0. Its working great and I can finally go back to blogging and not dealing with blog engine issues.

So, what about the old blog?

For now I am going to leave all my old content at the original URL and on Blogger until I find an easy way to migrate all posts and comments into this engine. I really am still considering this a “Beta” experience and a work in progress. I hope everything progresses without issue and I can be fully up and running shortly with everything converted.

So, what is up with the new “Mesh of Microsoft Technology” name?

With this new phase in my blogging experience I finally decided to come up with a blog name beyond “Lyalin Blog”, which was not exactly original. Many people who are more regular visitors here or colleagues tend to comment how I am “all over the place in my content” and I cant help that, so the new name should properly reflect the content of this blog. I just hope it doesn't sound too corny.

Goodbye Blogger

I want to say thank you to the Blogger team for a great experience while I was using them. Blogger truly is a good blogging service and still holds many advantages in my opinion over its competitors including Microsoft Spaces. Most of these “advantages” are merely ones of taste/visual appearance and not really functionality (especially since everyone supports Live Writer) but its still a worthy advantage in my view.

What's next?

My next steps include:

  • Working on the look of this blog until I am 100% happy, even though this template is a good start
  • Figuring out how to convert the old content into this blog engine
  • Add all the miscellaneous side items, links, ads, etc
  • and a bunch of other stuff that I cannot think of right now

As always I look forward to your feedback so feel free to write back to this thread with any input that comes to mind, good or bad.