This morning I have put live the new design for my blog.  For ages I have been unhappy with the look and feel of my blog, but as I know my limits :), I was struggling to come up with something to replace the default choice of theme.  I am pleased to announce now and start using, a great new design, courtesy of my colleague Peter Mitchell at Canford.  I am NOT a designer I am a DEVELOPER and therefore I know what I can and can't achieve.  I can often picture what I'd like to see but to create is a whole different ball game.  Thankfully Peter had the know how and has done a magnificent job!.  I thank him greatly for his time and efforts, and now all we need to do is get him blogging too!  I've been itching to use the new theme but had to wait for final fixing and testing.

At the same time of releasing the new design, you've probably noticed a lot of new content appearing, lets just say I have started to free up a lot more time for my blog and I'm really enjoying getting the information out there!  But wait that's not where the new content ends - I've also been working on the following:

• I've implemented the great Social Bookmarking Extension by Danny Douglas - this adds links to add posts to many of the social bookmarking services quickly and easily.
• I've updated the About Me page (or rather About Monkey now) with some updated information and a little more detail, including the interview recorded by Gary Short with me.
• I've reviewed a lot of my posts and updated links and removed long hyperlinks and replaced them with more meaningful titles for the underlying link

I hope you like the new design as much as I do and would love to hear your comments!

 

I've finally moved to a new Blogging Engine, I've been taking a look at the various options available for a while now, and have finally taken the plunge and I'm trying BlogEngine.Net.  I had looked at Subtext and DasBlog but I've been trying BlogEngine.Net for a couple of months while I tested functionality and decided that I would give this one a try and so far I have been impressed.  BlogEngine.Net is a CodePlex Project and is regularly updated and the team behind it have a very impressive roadmap and vision for the engine.  No sooner had they released the recent v1.2 build than they are already looking at v1.3.  My only gripe so far has been with the Blog Import tool, but I managed to find a way round it by importing my blog into the v1.1 release then upgrading to v1.2 and then published the blog.  I'll give a full run down of features in a future post.

My reason for moving to an engine was that I didn't have time to constantly tweak and develop my self created blog and even at some points the time it was taking to prepare a post and actually publish the post was prohibitive.  By using an engine which is being worked on by the community the work is shared and a lot of the functionality which I wanted to develop is already here.  Also I can now use, and am currently with this post, Windows Live Writer to prepare posts and post directly from any PC, I'm also going to be taking a look at blogging direct from Microsoft Office Word 2007.  Hopefully with a better engine behind my blog I'll be able to blog a lot more frequently, so expect to see lots of new content.

I have also moved to a new hosting package with Discount ASP.Net.  Discount ASP.Net are a well known Award Winning Web Hosting provider and are always ahead of the game in providing functionality for ASP.Net developers to take advantage of.  For example Discount ASP.Net are currently offering a free Beta Account with ASP.Net 3.5 and IIS7 Hosting together, showing there commitment to innovation and industry leading services.  I've not been happy with the lack of speed with which 1and1 move as regards to providing there customers with new features, especially with the high end shared hosting package like I was on, such as AJAX and SQL Server 2005 Support (both still not provided), plus with the costs and pricing plan that Discount ASP.Net employ I will also be making a significant cost saving.  My experience so far with set up and facilities provided my Discount ASP.Net has been excellent and I would fully recommend their services.

Recently I have been looking into moving my Blog over to a new engine and have been looking at a few different ones. I am close to moving my blog over to not just a new engine but also a new hosting package. Therefore I have set up a new feedburner account for syndication with my blog feed. If you have subscribed to my blog please update your subscription to point to http://feeds.feedburner.com/apwestgarth.  I will continue to maintain the original blog feed for a couple of weeks but will be turning it off at the end of October 2007.

The reason why I've not been very active in my blogging recently is the time it takes currently to post an entry.  Currently it is very time consuming for me to post a new entry due to the model behind my Blog.  I built the blog based on an article by Bipin Joshi in ASP.Net Pro Magazine last year.  My plan was to develop the blog and add multiple items to it and make it easier for me to post on.

I have been looking at multiple engines to use and came across BlogEngine.net a project on CodePlex which appears to be very good.  I am likely to implement this after some testing and customisation.  Does anyone else out there use this?  What are your opinions of it?  Are there any other engine's you recommend?