Well after some inspiration from a co-worker of mine, I have decided it's high time I joined the ranks of the virtual realm so affectionately known as the blogosphere.

Naturally, the hardest part of this venture has not been the choice of blog engine, hosting provider, nor the ____. Nay, the hardest part of this, like many bloggers [Spell-check suggests I change this to "floggers"] out there, will be coming up with some content. So now that the day is coming to a close, I figured I would recap the choices I ended up making for my blogging solution. Possibly other people out there looking to get started will find some of these tips helpful.

Step 1 - The Engine

As far as the engine was concerned I knew I didn't have many requirements. Now I had heard legends of the beast known as Community Server throughout my career as a .NET developer, and being the only real blog engine I had ever heard of, I figured I would give it a shot.

What a mistake.

The legends held true. Community Server is indeed a wild beast to tame. It is an absolutely massive application. After I finally managed to FTP the files to my host and work out the installation kinks, I was quite simply overwhelmed by the product that was presented to me. Now don't get me wrong, Community Server (despite all the negative buzz you may hear about it), has it's place in the world. A personal blog is certainly not that place. It has so many options for hosting a number of different blogs, forums, photo galleries, wikis, etc. This would all be very nice, for say,  a small business wanting to offer a blog to each of their developers, a wiki for each of their products... but not for me, and my humble 1-subscriber blog -- Hi mom!

That said, I heard good things about a product called dasBlog. The only thing that seemed strange about this engine was that it did not rely on a database back-end at all. It uses XML files for it's storage, as such the only real requirements are that your worker process have write access to the virtual directory. I'm happy with my decision thus far. It offers plenty of customization, ships with some nice themes, and was extremely easy to get up and running.

Step 2 - Authoring Tool

Ok, so I'm up and running. As I started to google and look around for what many people were using to author their blog content, I remembered an application that my co-worker told me about many months ago:

Windows Live Writer

This application rocks. It Just Works(TM). It has built in knowledge of many of the most popular blogging engines out there, and can determine your engine based simply on the URL to your blog. As soon as I fed it http://blog.matthidinger.com Windows Liver Writer was able to determine that I am using dasBlog, it even pulled my CSS theme down so that I can preview my entries exactly as their will appear on the site. Live Writer also knows know to publish to the engine, with the click of a button my latest blog entry is published to my site for my readers mom to read with great anticipation!

Step 3 - Syntax Highlighting

This blog will primarily be a .NET development blog. As such, I will be pasting a lot of code snippets and markup. Back to google.

Bingo - A Live Writer Plug-in called Paste from Visual Studio 

Now all I have to do, is highlight my code in Visual Studio, and click that Link in Live Writer to paste nice, syntax-highlighted code!

protected void btnUpdate_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    lblUpdate.Text = DateTime.Now.ToString();
}

<div class="login">
    <p>Hi</p>
    <asp:Button ID="Button1" runat="server" Text="Button" />
</div>

Step 4 - Screen Capture

Another co-worker of mine told me about some software he used (for a totally unrelated use), SnagIt.

This extremely convenient software has a lot of common capturing options, from whole windows, menus, selectable regions, etc. It also has a very fluid interface to take you from step to step, in quite simply the quickest way possible. I can highlight a rectangle of the screen in visual studio, add some "torn" edges, a drop-shadow, and some red-highlighting on a key area in less than 15 seconds. Very convenient. Live Writer also takes care of uploading images and linking them for me too, so these images never have to leave my desktop clipboard. What a brave new world we are living in.

This software costs $39.95 for an individual copy, but if you intend on being an avid blogger, it will pay for itself very quickly I'm sure.

Wrap-Up

Well that should get me started I think. If anyone out there somehow stumbles onto this and has any other suggestions for tools please let me know! With any luck someone out there will find this information useful.

Until next time...