When deciding on a blog platform, I had two clear options. It either be on WordPress (WP) or one which is based on ASP.NET. WordPress because it's the widely popular blogging platform, with the most support and the largest collection themes & widgets. (Just learned that Microsoft is shutting down Live Spaces, one of its online blog platforms and migrating the users to WordPress). WP’s drawback is it's developed in PHP, a language I don't program in and which I am not interested in learning & using.
OR
An ASP.NET based blogging platform because I know ASP.NET very well, in case I need to do any custom work, which I did for this blog. I decided to go with an ASP.NET based blog engine and chose BlogEngine (BE). The other candidates where dasBlog& Subtext.
My blog platform requirements are:
- widely used and has good active support
- supports themes
- supports threaded comments
- has measures against spam comments (comment moderation, Akismet, .. etc)
- being actively developed. Meaning last build is not more than a year ago.
- supports protocols for publishing using clients like Windows Live Writer
BlogEngine seems to best fit these requirements. One issue I found with BlogEngine is the lack of cool themes. All the themes I found were simple, look pretty much the same and quite boring. A lot of the BlogEngine based blogs use the default theme which comes with BE.
In my next blog, I will talk about the WordPress theme I used for this blog and how I modified it to work in BlogEngine.
