A long overdue overhaul

I haven’t blogged much over the past few years. Part of that was a focus on other interests to be sure, but more recently, it was the blog itself that was keeping me from blogging. 

BlogEngine.NET has been good to me but things were feeling a bit long in the tooth in a few areas.  I had not updated to 2.0 or beyond and was really a bit unsure what I’ve wanted to do with my blog.  I’ve had lots of ideas for updates, tweaks, and the like.  Every time I would think about writing, I’d think about things I wish my blog handled better or were just different.

Avdi Grimm wrote about something similar a while back and it sounded a lot like where I’ve been at.

Before I started doing technical blogging in ~2006-2007, I spent literally years hamstrung by my need to come up with “the perfect” blogging platform. I’d come up with some topic I wanted to blog about, then that would lead to thinking about that blog system I wanted to write, and I’d wind up writing nothing.

While Avdi was writing about his reasons for using WordPress and how this keeps him from fiddling with it, to me it was the voice of someone feeling the same things I was but making some choices to get the focus back on the writing.

As one of the original BlogEngine devs, I wasn’t willing to give up dabbling with blogging tool at all, but I needed to make some choices to remove the reasons I wasn’t writing.  Over the weekend, I made a list of my “must have” features, pulled the source and spent a few hours making the changes I felt were at the top of my list of need to have.  I cleaned it up with a simple responsive theme and here it is. 

BlogEngine.NET 2.6 has a lot of new things I was missing, including a few of the items on my list. Pulling up the code was like pulling on an old sweatshirt that you have buried in your closet.  Familiar, comfortable, and welcoming.  Not sure my changes will or even should go in the BE source, but it isn’t something I’m even thinking about in the short term.  I’m now thinking about writing again.