Approximately 4 weeks ago I decide to dump my old website in favor of a real blogging engine. I decide to go with BlogEngine.NET. I really like the engine and thoroughly enjoyed it for about 2 weeks. There where a few issues that just couldn't be handle without diving into the code. I thought about asking the developers to "fix" the issues (technically add the features) but I would not dare ask. 

I just could not bring myself to ask when I know that I'm very capable of adding the features myself. One of the feature that I wanted was a old URL to redirect to the new one. Ex. "/articles/3" to redirect to "/page/Bobby-Cannons-Resume.aspx". I research on how I could simple create an extension but it just couldn't be done. I thought well if I add this one feature I will own the blog.

I've decide to branch BlogEngine to SharpBlog. I thought simply contributing to the project but I've changed so much. I've upgrade the assembly to .NET 4. I also changed the website project into a web application. This took a good bit of work and the changes are just too much to feedback into the BlogEngine project. However if they ever decide to move forward then I would love to simple use BlogEngine. I fear by that time I will simple have made to many modification and upgrades to move away from SharpBlog.

I am a refactoring freak. I will be walking through the whole project line by line. If I find problems I will be reporting these problems to BlogEngine to be sure to give back to the project.

I've always been a fan of Scott Hanselman. He very smart and entertaining. I subscribe to his weekly 30 minute podcast called Hanselminutes. The link below are to a video cast of Scott explaining why every developer needs to have a blog and I couldn't agree more. Getting your ideas out to print is very beneficial. I feel that my blog has helped me greatly with my communication skills. Yes and I'm still working on them.

My website has been through many changes through out the years. At first it was just to help me learn HTML. Later I started developing software and wanted to sell it so it became very commercial. I finally decided that no I want to simply blog so I created my own "blog" engine which totally sucked. Just a few weeks ago I decided that I'm done trying to recreate the wheel (there is a time and place for this but that's another blog entry) and installed BlogEngine.NET. Now I have a real blog with RSS feeds and everything that a blog should be. 

I've done just about everything he said not to in his talk. I've blogged so many times about not blogging. Sounds silly now that I look back on it. I really feel that I have gotten it right this time. I will blog when I have something to blog about. Turns out if you just do it that it's not that hard. And it is easier than you think. Yes some may say that it's not worth it because no one will read your blog. Well that's fine but there's plenty of other reasons to do it. Check out the video cast and prepare to become a Scott Hanselman fan!

Note: You may need to download the WMV or Zune (Quality WMV, still will play in WMP) because I kept getting the error below when trying to stream the video cast.

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In this talk, I propose that EVERY developer needs a blog.

In 2009, I presented a talk at Wintellect's Devscovery conference called "Social Networking for Developers." My postulate was that EVERY developer should be using Social Networking, and this talk I gave was my introduction of this idea to a large group. This was the keynote for the conference. I finally got ahold of the source recordings (only guerilla recordings had been available previously) and as even those recordings were popular, so I'm preserving these talks here as a way of encouraging more discussion.

[/quote]

Every Developer Needs a Blog - Part 1

Every Developer Needs a Blog - Part 2