So I figured I better explain myself on this one.

After a brief hiatus of over a year (yeah... "brief") I have finally decided to start blogging again. Rather than try and write my own blogging software I figured I'd fall back on an old friend, dasBlog. If any of you actually followed my blog before you might notice that I've followed this chain: dasBlog > Community Server by Telligent > Tessa (my custom one) > dasBlog; talk about going full circle!

dasBlog has come quite a long way since I've last used it a few years ago. Setup was a breeze, they now have IIS7 integrated pipeline support (which means IIS7 has more control over the flow of the program and generally just seems cooler!) and they finally support .Net 2.0! While I know I could've used any online blogging service such as Google's Blogger (actually there was a one post stint on blogger), or WordPress I've always liked the idea of running my own site locally. I suppose I could've done it like Jared and had Blogger upload it to me via FTP but that still wasn't good enough. I wanted something that will work immediately, but allow me to edit it, extend it, and generally change it in the future without many problems. Naturally, understanding someone else's codebase is much harder to do than writing your own, I have learned a lot about programming in the last few years as well. In fact, that was one of the reasons I took Tessa down, I ended up learning so much that I was actually upset with what I had written and could no longer hack it together... I was actually planning on a complete rewrite!

Maybe in the future I'll progress down the same road as described above but I wanted something to let me write my topics now. You know, as they happen. This blog will be whatever I want it to be right now, there is no goal, there is no direction, it is just a place for me to jot my thoughts down and let others read them if they so desire. Obviously, given my background, most of the posts will probably be technical but that is how things work. I have gotten quite a bit of information on the internet from other blogs just like this one. Here's the scenario: some guy out there has a problem that is just causing all sorts of havoc and while the answer eludes them they eventually figure it out. Now at this point they would have a couple of choices but I am only interested in two.

1. They do nothing and go on their merry way, maybe they wrote it down for themselves or documented it though some work order system or maybe they didn't. Who knows?

2. They decide "hey, that was a pain, but let me write about it and post it online; that way if anyone else has this same problem, they can read my fix and get going much quicker."

I certainly hope they choose option #2 because I can benefit from it... it can save me time, and let me fix whatever the problem is quicker. Of course, whoever posted that information usually isn't asking for anything in return (generally) and will usually get nothing in return other than the satisfaction that maybe, just maybe, their post has helped someone else. (and in this field that can actually go a long way – why else would you be writing if it wasn't to help others?) So I figure after many, many years of reading posts, seeing code snippets, and having that elusive answer posted right in front of me I can finally return the favor and maybe, just maybe, someone might find my post helpful for them.

Imported Comments

Jared on 2009-01-17 23:45:14 wrote:

Josh,

1. You use OpenID? You officially cannot bitch about it again.

2. Your header says "Now with more content!" - shouldn't that be "Now with content!"

3. I don't have Blogger upload by FTP - I have GoDaddy redirect blog.jaredharley.com to Google's servers. Everything is stored over there, and I like it that way.

Joshua on 2009-01-18 19:27:11 wrote:

Good point... I changed it from "Now with more content!" to "Now with actual content!"