Brian Sullivan » Misc

Back From the Dead

Brian — Sat, 16 May 2009 19:41:04 +0000

I just realized that it’s been four months since I’ve last posted a blog entry, which is just dumb. Like most bloggers, I started out with good intentions, but other things (work, family, sleep) just got in the way. There’s also kind of a snowball effect. Once you’ve not posted in awhile, you feel more compelled to make your next post really great to make up for the lost time, which just makes you even more hesitant to post.

Well, it’s time to end the cycle. I hereby publicly declare that I will post at least something every day this week, just to get the juices flowing again. It may not be technical in nature, and it may be utterly useless, but I think I just need to muscle past this block to get going again. I apologize in advance for any time you may waste reading the ramblings that may result from this push. ;-)

Going Dark for a Bit…

Brian — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 08:12:00 +0000

My hosting plan with GoDaddy is about up, and I’m going to be switching hosting providers. This site may be down for a bit, but if you’ve subscribed via my FeedBurner feed, you should pick up the change as soon as I’m back up and running. See you on the flip side!

Weird RSS-ness

Brian — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 00:50:00 +0000

Not sure what’s going on, but I’ve been experiencing some weirdness with my RSS feed since I switched to BlogEngine.net. Just yesterday, I was notified that I had two new blog posts. This piqued my curiosity, since I could not remember posting anything. Perhaps my evil twin? Well, it turns out that the “new” posts were actually old posts. And they weren’t even the two mosts recent posts. I think I may have to take this up with the BE.net team. Has anyone else using BE.net experienced this?

Sorry for cluttering up your RSS aggregators, hopefully ‘ll get this addressed soon.

Switching to BlogEngine.NET

Brian — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 13:22:43 +0000

You may have noticed that things look a little different around here. I finally got fed up with the themes in dasBlog. The CSS in many of them was just plain bad, with fields overlapping each other and content scrolling off the screen when it shouldn’t. I know theming seems like kind of a small thing to switch blog engines over, but really, the look and feel of your website can say a lot about your professionalism, so I felt it was worth it to find something I was happy with.

I looked at several different engines before deciding on BlogEngine.NET. WordPress is very popular, and can be made to look very nice, but my site is hosted on Windows, and from what I read WordPress needs to run on Linux. I also looked at GraffitiCMS, which was very nice, and much easier to set up than other CMSes I’ve worked with before. Although blogging is possible with it, it seems a little more general-purpose than I was looking for.

I watched a how-to video on setting up BlogEngine.NET, and looked fairly lightweight and easy to set up. I also liked the variety of acceptably clean-looking themes. The clincher for me though, was this post by Merill Fernando talking about exporting his dasBlog setup to blogML and being able to import it right into BlogEngine.NET. He even wrote a nice little GUI front-end to handle the export from dasBlog. The whole process was pretty painless, and I didn’t lose my old posts.

I also picked up the nice DarkBlog theme created by Ruslan Tur, but changed the stylesheets to use blue text instead of green. I’m pretty happy with the result, and I’d recommend BlogEngine.NET to anyone looking for an engine. Your thoughts on the change are welcome!