I started with .Text and it served me well.

When .Text was folded into CommunityServer, it was time for a change.  I considered community server. You have to know it's a great product (and I'm using it elsewhere) but it was too much for my meager single blogging needs. (Note: The Telligent guys are working on a more "personal" product called Graffiti - Click Here to Sign Up to be Notified about the Private Beta)

While I use DasBlog on a couple of other projects (and I LOVE it), I wanted a database backend. I chose Subtext. And it has also served me well. But alas, my needs have outgrown SubText and I've been pestering SubText's principal (Phil Haack) too much. Especially since Phil now works at Microsoft.

Subtext has an active community, a good themes selection etc. but it lacked some features that I was needing and I couldn't get the BlogML export to work.

Meanwhile Mads Kristensen has been emailing me about the progress of the BlogEngine.NET team.

It's a young project, but looks very well thought out, so after some research I thought I'd give it a try.

BUT, I had a big problem. Subtext kept crashing when I tried to export the data and I really could NOT lose all my posts and start over. I did that when I switched from .Text and my readers were not happy.

I emailed Mads to see if maybe there was a tool or he had some code I could start with. He pointed me to Al Nyveldt who he called THE Import/Export Guy.

Al is my new Hero !!!!

He offered to do the conversion for me. He did in a day what it would have taken me ages to do. And my new boog is up and running on BlogEngine.NET - THANKS AL and MADS !

A few observations.

• SPEED - It's FAST FAST FAST !
• Features - lots of cool stuff.
• Pages - I can now ad static pages easily in the context of my blog.
• Good code !  I've started to look at the code as I want to write some additions. It's well written and easy to understand.
• Themes - too few!.

So .......

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Build some dark colored full width themes for BE.NET.

I'd do it myself but I have no artistic ability at all.