Out with the Old

I've been wanting to get back to posting for some time now, but time has been at a premium. Still somehow today I finally got the motivation to start looking at setting up my blogspace again. Last time around I tried using DotNetNuke with a blogging module that they provided. If you've never used it before, DotNetNuke is a very powerful content management system for .NETish environments. There are tons of modules, themes, and plugins available for it and it is backed by a very active community. Unfortunately, I ran into two issues with it.

First, my entire purpose for installing it was just to provide support for the blog module. The DotNetNuke blog module was still a fairly early version at that point and a lot of the features associated with more developed blogging tools like WordPress or MovableType were either absent or required some workarounds to reproduce similar features.

The second issue I ran into I attribute a bit to the popularity of DotNetNuke. Unfortunately, the internet is what it is and any software of sufficient popularity is going to come under attack from script kiddies. In my case, someone either used an exploit in DotNetNuke or managed to crack an admin account in the CMS and was able to create a text file in a content directory. From there they posted a link to the file on a brag site which Google conveniently enough decided to show as one of the top hits for my site.  (Isn't that awesome!) I really had nobody to blame except myself on this one. It had been probably close to a year since I installed DotNetNuke and I hadn't been diligent on updates. I have no idea whether being up-to-date would have prevented it, but certainly running old code with well-known exploits isn't the best way to keep your site off the hacked lists.

Ultimately, due to the combination of these two issues, I ended up uninstalling DotNetNuke and started rethinking what I wanted to do with this space.

In with the New

After a few months of being mostly too busy to even think about this, I accidentally found some motivation to put something back together. For rather boring reasons I needed to temporarily host a file for someone and that meant digging out all my connection information again and bringing myself back up to speed on the state of my site. Once I got into it though, I realized it might end up being less of a chore than I had worried about. So, yet again, I went shopping for blogging software, but this time around I’m trying out BlogEngine.NET.

This brings me to the title… I’ve been playing with themes to try to find something more or less professional, but not so stuffy. There are quite a few available out there, but just about everything I’ve found has had some little quirk (like bullet points that render out of frame or something similar) that makes me hold off committing to it. Right now, I’m sticking with one of the defaults, but expect it to change soon!

Oh… and this time I plan on keeping up-to-date with the updates. BlogEngine.NET isn’t as popular as DotNetNuke, but you can still Google up exploits on it in a few seconds.