Howdy all,
This weekend Krista and I set up blog sites. Both to share some of the old travel and living overseas postings we've written over the years, as well as to help keep in touch with friends today.
We looked at a number of fairly good free blogging solutions on the web, but in the end decided to self-host the thing because (1) we've had our own web site (www.kristaandivo.com) for a few years now and wanted something that integrated seamlessly with that and (2) i wanted to fiddle around with any blog-app we used, making changes and improvements over time.
A quick Google search brought me to DotNetLogEngine.net; a free-source ASP.NET based solution. Results so far have quite impressed me...
+ Getting up and running actually only took about an hour, including downloading the source code, and uploading it to our web site.
+ Making some initial modifications proved very easy. Within about another hours work, I had already integrated in a Google-Ad display widget (the skyscraper add on your right) -- not really a money maker, but I am always interested to see what ads get generated and chosen for display. Customizing the UI further proved fairly simple as well, both using the built in administrative UI as well as hacking around a bit in the code. Almost all the changes I wanted to make were doable in CSS...with a little bit of HTML, and only a few lines of code; good stuff!
+ Licensing terms are "derivative works friendly" -- meaning that anyone with the source code can take it any any direction they want without needing to worry much about GPL, LGPL, or mixing private and public code. Again -- it meets the "fun to tinker with & see where it goes" bar very well.
+ Did not need to read the instructions -- Literally, through the entire process I think i spent about 20 minutes reading "how to" documentation, everything else was "just try it and see what happens" -- i like that a lot!
So hats off to the http://www.dotnetblogengine.net/ team; you've done something both fun and useful -- that's great to see!
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