Over the last few days I have been playing with a few different systems to set up a blog, as well as to find something for the Winnipeg .NET User Group to use as a new system for our website. Since we are a .NET user group, we need a .NET technology solution - so I was looking at a few items.

For my personal site, I looked into 2 solutions - Blog Engine .NET and DasBlog - and here are my experiences with them both, as well as setting them up on GoDaddy.

DasBlog

This was the second one I tried. It seemed pretty good, and I recognized many times as contributors to the system. I got this one working on my local machine in fairly short order. It writes all data to the file system instead of to a database, which works fine locally but on a hosted server... was not sure how that would work. I know I can set folder permissions, but still a little unsure of how to administer that.

So, I set it up locally. All worked well. Then I uploaded the files to my hosting account. Look in the root and... what were all these other files? Turns out that when GoDaddy uninstalled all of the other applications I have installed on my account, they only deleted the database - they did not delete the files. So, sitting there in my file system, were all the physical files from my WordPress installation (they copied over the files from the Linux setup to Windows, even after their tools said it was uninstalled), a previous attempt at Blog Engine .NET, as well as an installation of Community Server.

Blog Engine .NET

This was my 3rd attempt at getting this sucker installed. Each time I used the automatic installation it didn't work. However, I never looked at the file system then, as it was an automatic installation by GoDaddy. When I contacted them about the installation not working, they told me I installed it incorrectly and should reinstall it. I pointed out that it was them who installed it, not me, and I never heard back from them. After trying DasBlog above, I found the files in the file system. I removed all outstanding files and reinstalled... and worked almost perfectly. GoDaddy installs Blog Engine using the SQL interface so I assumed that all items are database driven. Wrong. Turns out that the links to other blogs are file system driven still, so had to add edit capabilities to the folder and now it seems like all functions work.

Coming up next... analysis of various tools I am experimenting with for the UG web site. Any recommendations on free web hosting?