InfiniTec - Henning Krauses Blog

Don't adjust your mind - it's reality that is malfunctioning

New Blog Engine

I've finally switched to a real blog engine with my site - previously I used a homegrown .NET 2.0 solution with an InfoPath form to publish posts. Especially the latter was a little frustrating :-). It took me two days to get the new blog running. I had hoped to do this with less time. Anyway, the blog engine I use now is - nomen est omen - BlogEngine.Net. I can finally write my posts with LiveWriter.

Pros:

  • It's open source and free
  • It's relatively small compared to other solutions (like dasBlog)
  • It seems there are still people working on it
  • Basic installation was done within a few minutes.

Cons:

  • The import tool sucks - basically it doesn't work with either RSS or BlogML. I had to rewrite that tool from scratch.
  • Passwords are stored in clear text - Who does this anymore? Luckily, it wasn't hard to modify the membership provider so it stores only hashes of passwords.
  • The server side import api does not import the last-modified date from the post. To make things worse, the import procedure tries to convert the last modified date to UTC by adding the inverse of the specified time zone from the settings. Guess what happens if you have a positive time zone (CEST +02:00) and subtract this value from DateTime.MinValue....
  • The server side import api does support the concept of a legacy url - yet this feature is not implemented at all. So I had to add that as well....
  • The posts where sorted by creation date, not by the last modification time - seems to be the standard but I'm not comfortable with it.

Was it worth all the work? I think so:

  • The site has now a better comment system
  • Blog posts can be rated again
  • Trackbacks and Pings are supported
  • There are now RSS feeds for categories
  • I've also added search bar (via LiveSearch - I wonder why Google does not offer something like this)
  • Recent posts are listed on the left side.
  • And finally: A list of all articles via the Archive page.

So, have fun with the new site.


Posted by Henning Krause on Tuesday, May 13, 2008 8:50 PM, last modified on Wednesday, November 24, 2010 7:43 PM
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