A while I had a problem with my old blog at goinsane, and as I was now posting regularly at devlicio.us I didn’t pay it too much attention. Recently I have had a few people contacting me about my old site not working, so I figured I best get it up and running properly.
Looking around at blog software, I went through the usual suspects including DasBlog which I used to use. Great piece of software that DasBlog is, I kept finding references to BlogEngine.Net so I thought I would give it a try.
The software itself was simplicity to get up and running, far easier than I remember it was with DasBlog, and a whole world of pain less that Community Server. Pretty much an FTP to my host, and I had a blog up and running.
After playing around a while I found a few things were annoying me, so I looked to get those sorted out.
Code Formatting
This has always been a problem, due to the peculiar way markup works, and due to various addins, I can never seem to get code quite the way I would like. On devlicio.us I have been using the formatter from manoli.net but this often has quirks.
BlogEngine.Net has a version of the manoli formatter built in as an extension (extensions are a really cool idea in BlogEngine), but it wasn’t quite working for me – sometimes my code formatted one way, sometimes another. It turns out that this has been mentioned a few times in various places, and it seems the built in extension is a little picky on how things are formatted.
After a bit of searching I came across SyntaxHighlighter, but the theme I had chosen to use doesn’t like <pre> tags too much. A little more searching and I came across an alternative SyntaxHighlighter for BlogEngine.Net on CodePlex. This one was much simpler to install – just copy over the .cs files to your extensions folder, replacing the built in formatter. And it looks great:
TinyMCE to FCKEditor
Now my next annoyance, TinyMCE is the chosen editor in BlogEngine.Net, and one of the things TinyMCE does badly is let you put in the tags to get the syntax highlighting working.
Luckily, it is pretty easy to replace the editor in BlogEngine.net, and so I searched around and found some pretty good instructions. Fifteen minutes later and my editor was replaced.
Conclusion
All in all, BlogEngine.Net has been a delight to setup, and although my main blog will remain at devlicio.us, I will now try and ensure I cross post to my own domain just to keep Google happy.
If you need to get a blog up and running on your own domain, you should certainly check BlogEngine.Net out
Posted
10-27-2008 12:48 PM
by
Jak Charlton