Having played with several blogging engines over the last few years and having experience in .NET programming since 2000.  I decided to take a look at BlogEngine.net.  I've previously worked with blogs based on .Text, dasBlog and Community Server and they all were interesting and worked well. I was just not crazy about the upgrading of some of these other engines.

Plus as a developer I always like to get under the covers of what is going on in the code to get a good understanding of what the software is doing. Well while browsing http://www.asp.net/ and taking a look at the starter kits, I saw the BlogEngine.net project there.  I proceeded to take a look at the project site for the starter kit and then took a look at the project site on CodePlex.  I then decided to give it a try.

A few years ago I had started work on creating a community site here at Learn MS NET and it didn't pan out quite like I wanted so I had basically mothballed the domain.  I had also been playing around with blog engines at a URL for my business http://blog.shancer.com/ which I had written a few articles for.  So I made the decision in early December to combine both my mothballed site's content which only had a few articles of interest and relevance and the blog posts from my business blog.

Which has led me to using BlogEngine.net and currently working with the latest build from last night at this point.  I ported all my content from dasBlog which was the blogging engine I was using with BlogML.  It took some playing around to get it complete but it worked fantastically for pulling that content in.  I then took and renamed my old community web site and proceeded to copy all the articles out and place on this new site.

Now that i'm becoming familiar with how the source works for BlogEngine.net I will be developing some extensions and helping improve some of the extensions that are already available.  Look for more on this in the future.