This announcement is a bit late, but better late than never. I've officially joined the BlogEngine.NET development team. Initially my contribution will be integrating Mono support for BlogEngine.NET, but I hope to subsequently contribute a whole lot more.

I'm very excited as it's the first open-source development effort I've joined, and BlogEngine.NET rocks!

So as you can see, my new theme is live. I still consider it a work in progress though, so don't be surprised if it changes.

Having now played with BlogEngine.NET themes, I can really say that I'm impressed with the theme mechanism and layout. Modifying an existing theme (CoffeeCup by Michael Silvers) was an absolute breeze. There are no tables in sight, the CSS crowd will be pleased. A nice side effect of using standard compliant HTML is that the blog is viewable even from a text browser on Linux like Lynx.

I know I will be using the BlogEngine.NET layout as a template for any new sites I design. Just another way that OSS helps to educate the masses.

Ok, I have to just say this. Live Writer and BlogEngine.NET rock! The BlogEngine.NET integration is flawless and it's such a pleasure to use that I hardly have words to describe it. And yes, I'm a blog noob, so I'm only figuring this out now.

If you're not using Live Writer (or another offline blog writer) then do yourself a favour, try it now!

Just downloaded Windows Live Writer. The TinyMCE web interface was seriously starting to work on my nerves. I was going to attempt to integrate FCKEditor into BlogEngine (some more detail here), but then I realised that BlogEngine.NET actually has Live Writer support! For a lightweight blog engine, BlogEngine.NET rocks.

This serves as my first Live Writer post, so let's hope this actually gets posted!

Finally, we're up and running on an Ubuntu 6.06 box running apache2 with mod_mono 1.2.5.1.

I've managed to get most of the features working, enough for the site to be usable. Currently outstanding features (that I've been able to find during preliminary testing) are the following:

• Rate this post returns an error dialog.
• Countries are missing from the comments section (i suspect due to mono's incomplete globalisation support).
• Saving comments doesn't work all that well.
• Globalization settings in had to be removed for now from the Settings admin page.

I've documented all the changes I've made, you can see them here.

I'll be busy customizing the blog now, and as and when I run into more issues I'll update the page mentioned above.

If you need to get hold of me regarding the conversion, use the Contact form on the blog. 

Ok, so judging by the amount of time it took for this next post to materialize, one could guess that I wasn't all that lucky in my Mono endeavour. You'd be right. Turns out BlogEngine.NET isn't Mono compatible. Or one could say that Mono's version of ASP.NET isn't ready for prime time yet.

Either way, it's taken me quite a bit of effort to get where I am today. Currently I'm writing this post via Mono/XSP on Windows, so I've clearly made some real progress. The next step is getting this running on my Linux server. As I'm a bit of a Linux noob, that could take a couple of days to happen too.

I've documented all the changes I've made to BlogEngine.NET, so I'll be posting an article with those changes sometime soon

I've chosen to use BlogEngine.NET as my open-source blog engine of choice. This was by no means decided on in any scientific manner at all. I basically just checked out all the open-source C# bloggers at http://csharp-source.net/open-source/bloggers and had a look at their homepages.

The only 2 that really took my fancy was DasBlog and BlogEngine.NET. Downloading and examining the source packages for both led me to believe that BlogEngine.NET was likely to suit my needs better. All that really means is that it looked simpler :P

I'll follow up this post with some more motivation once I get this running on Mono on my Ubuntu server. Currently I'm writing this from the relative safety of Visual Studio on my windows box. I'll let you know how it went shortly (if i'm lucky)!