Shiny new site

Welcome to my first blog post. It’s been a long time coming,
but at last I have managed to re-launch my website and blog. It’s a great
feeling and fills me with optimism as it has been a long journey and I did
wonder at times if I would ever get this far. But this is really just the
beginning; now I have to write something interesting…

The web has taught us to release early and iterate. I have struggled to apply this process to my
own site, trying instead to make everything perfect. But this has lead to my
realisation that you can’t ever achieve perfection, especially on the web, which
is a constantly developing platform. So hopefully this site is “good enough”
and I can amend and add changes as needed.

[more]

One of the good things I have found on my journey was the
BlogEngine.Net. Like it says on the tin it is a .Net blog engine but this one
unlike those that came before combines some very useful features and approaches
the whole thing with the right attitude. First off it is open source and secondly
it works hard to create quality code that is both semantic and standards
compliant, something I wanted but never really expected from a .Net solution.
When I started this project it was on version 1.2 and now as I go live we are
on 1.45, so it is still early days but each development has been a marked
improvement and the most recent version makes it even easier to develop
extensions.

Some of the features that interested me included the support
for microformats, APML and a thorough support for RSS, but I’m really only
going to know how good it is once I start using it properly, and none of that
will matter if the content doesn’t interest anyone so I guess I better get on
with it.