If I was smart, I would've taken the easy way out. However, when I finally decided on a blogging platform, I didn't pick WordPress. Essentially it boiled down to the fact, that I'm cheap and I'm lazy. I'm too cheap to pay somebody else to host it for me and I'm too lazy to install or learn PHP or MySQL.

Anyway, I had the following desires for a blogging platform

• Designed for IIS / ASP.net
• Database server based (SQL Server preferred)
• Open source preferred

Essentially, I wanted to stick with what I know best. PHP & IIS go together like Toyata & NASCAR. It might be great someday, but today it is an awkward marriage that has promise. Also, the more software a server has, the more crap that can go wrong with it. Besides, I'm kinda partial to C# / ASP.net anyway.

After lots of deep thought, I eventually decided on Subtext. Subtext is based off the now defunct .TEXT blogging engine. .TEXT was originally designed by Scott Watermasysk who later went on to develop Community Server (which is a commercial product). Anyway, Phil Haack (I wonder if he thanks his parents for the cool, yet geeky last name) picked through the ashes of .TEXT code base and created Subtext. (I also considered Das Blog, but I wanted a DB back end, instead of a file system).

Setting up Subtext was pretty easy. The only thing that tripped me up was setting up the Host Admin so that feed points to my domain instead of http://localhost. That and tweaking the skin to match my company web site look (let's just say my CSS skills fall far short of the CSS Zen Garden bar)

So far, I'm loving FCK Editor that Subtext ships with, instead of the sad excuse for a rich text editor that WordPress has. And having the source code for a C# / ASP.net based blogging engine is cool since I might learn something from it. Anyway, I apologize for the mess. I'm still unpacking and it'll probably take a little while before this feels like home.

Since Caffeinated Software is a Real Estate Web Site Design / IDX vendor, I'll be talking about a few things in particular. What we do (develop software), how we do it (a whole lot of C#, ASP.net, and T-SQL), who we serve (real estate brokers, agents & their clients), where we live (Greater Seattle / Eastside) and how we can serve our customers better. I'm hoping you'll enjoy the conversation.