It's always the little things that chafe, you know? I mean, for the most part I'm happy with Windows Live Spaces, but there are little things that bug me from time to time so I find myself getting antsy. On the plus side, I like the modules and the freedom to place them where I want them. I like the book list (but I'd like it better if I could a) put it in the order I want and b) could rate the books listed there). I like my links.

But I find that I keep wanting things I get with more of a hosting service. I want more control. I'm a tinkerer, what can I say? So I've been looking at blogging software a bit. Since I have an account at Go Daddy, I'd like to find something that I can use there, and I'd like very much for it to be created in ASP.NET. It'd be nice if it was open source as well, if only so I can tweak and explore at my own capricious whim. Also, as long as I'm putting together a wish-list, how about if it could be programmed in ASP.NET 2.0? I mean, master pages and application themes with skinning support is, uh, lacking an appropriate white-guy expression, "da shiz".

The front-runners in the .NET space for blogging software appear to be SubText and DasBlog--both are branches from their progenitor .Text which appears to be defunct. Unfortunately, since .Text was originally ASP.NET 1.1, both SubText and DasBlog are rooted in that technology. They both support custom themes, but they had to hack ASP.NET 1.1 to do so--mostly with custom controls.

DasBlog

I was originally drawn more to DasBlog because I've become a fan of Scott Hanselman--first from his podcasts, Hanselminutes, but later to his blog (which actually uses DasBlog, kudos for eating the dinner you've made). He's one of those over-producers who seems to have his hand in on fifteen million things at a time and is able to simultaneously talk about it all.

However, DasBlog's main website is frequently down, and there doesn't appear to be a lot of action in the form of improvements, releases, news, or updates. Which makes me wonder if it isn't a dying product, suffering from Scott's hyper interests.

SubText

SubText is developed by another blogger I like, Phil Haack. Phil also lives in the house he built so you'll hear his experiences with SubText on his blog sometimes. I was intrigued to see him announce that SubText 1.9 has been released recently. SubText 1.9 is a project conversion to ASP.NET 2.0 so I was reasonably excited to see its release.

So excited that I went ahead with an install. It was a painful experience. Not because SubText isn't a pretty good product, but an install on a cheap Go Daddy account is a step or three down from the expected configuration. The main blockage is that while Go Daddy gives you dbo (owner) privileges on your database, you have highly restricted rights on the master database. Unfortunately, the install assumes that you can use a select on a master location to see if a table already exists and that select blew chunks.

One advantage of open source, though, is that someone reasonably competent (or simply lucky as is more likely my case) can dig through the install process and see what needs to happen. Since I could see that the table didn't exist, I ran the script manually. Unfortunately, since the install tracks installation stage in memory instead of checking the database, I ended up having to do the entire install manually instead of just that first step. Ouch.

So it was a hack, but it appears to have succeeded. I'm not entirely happy with the implementation, though, because while SubText is now ASP.NET 2.0, it doesn't actually use the new master page and theme features. Those may be implemented in future, but since that's a relatively fundamental alteration, it would break a lot of things--particularly a lot of user-created theme files. Creating work for yourself is one thing, but making your users go back and re-do all the custom themes they so generously contributed to your project is going to be a hard sell when there isn't a well established benefit. Indeed, the roadmap implies that if it happens, it's at least two releases away (and frankly, 2.1 looks a little daunting to me and should probably be cut down some if they want to take less than a year with it).

SUB

One of Phil's more endearing traits is a kind of perverse generosity that led him to advertise for a competitor (while throwing down the gauntlet of course). Since I'm not entirely happy with SubText, I thought that I'd give SUB (Single-User Blog) a look-see.

Frankly, I like SUB. It's pretty simple and since it's done from scratch in ASP.NET 2.0, it has all the goodies I've been looking for and some I had thought of but didn't figure I could get.

Unfortunately, SUB has two draw-backs that make me hesitate. The first is that it is, as its title clearly states, single-user. One thing I came to like about SubText is that you can support more than one blog from an installation. Indeed, I was able to point both domains I had registered with Go Daddy to the same location, have them run the exact same files, and yet have each site perfectly individualized (it does this by checking the incoming URL address to know which blog settings to use).

The second draw-back has to do with my personal tastes in programming, so I'm going to leave that for another post.

So what?

I've no idea what I'll end up doing with my blog(s). Since one of them is a new one for Cawti, I'll have to make some relatively irrevocable choices really soon here. I'm feeling all Frankensteiny, though, so I may just mash pieces of lots of different things together so I can terrorize intolerant villagers. Yeah, that sounds fun...

Update:

Woa. Scott Hanselman got a hold of this post (so he's the one who visited last night!) and responded. Which is frankly really cool of him to do. I'll attempt clarification in a comment there, though his points are good ones.