When you have a web site, for instance an installation of BlogEngine, you often want to be able to know about errors on it and if it is down. There are a lot of tools to help you out here, but in this post I will talk about using a build-in ASP.NET feature called Health Monitoring and a tool I wrote called WebMonitor.

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So today it happened, finally, the new version of BlogEngine has been released. It comes with some major Comment Spam Protection changes, multi widget support and more. This is all great and I really hope that this can beat these bad comment spam bots, which I guess we all hate.

I have just upgraded my blog to this latest release and the upgrade went pretty good without any real problems. So far so good, now I just have to wait and see if the spam protection is working as intended.

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Some time ago I decided I wanted a new theme on my blog as I got tired of the old one. So, I started looking/searching for a nice theme for BlogEngine that I could use. After about 15 min. I had found ALL themes for BlogEngine on the web…very disappointed! I don’t know why, but there is very few themes for this blog engine out there. Why? I really don’t know, because it’s actually pretty easy to make them. Basically what I found was this: http://www.dotnetblogengine.net/page/themes.aspx which have 4 links to sites that have some themes each. It’s NOTHING compared to Word Press.
As I got through the first 3 links on the link above I got more and more sad. Then I got to the 4. one http://www.jankoatwarpspeed.com. This blog didn’t had a nice theme as a download, but it had a really nice looking theme on the blog it self. Through Twitter I contacted Janko Jovanovic which is the owner of the blog and creator of the theme. I asked which theme the theme were based on and he told me it were made by himself. Dammit, were my first thought :) I then asked if he would share the theme with me and he said that I could get inspired by it. So I did. :)

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I have now hear about the ability to blog from LIVE writer on the blog engine.net as I’m using, and today I decided to give it a try.

It actually works pretty simple and easy.

1. Get LIVE writer from http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/ (I use the beta)
2. Install it – Note that it will install a beta version of MSN Messenger, which I couldn’t find a way to avoid.
3. LIVE writer will ask for you blog url, username and password.
4. LIVE writer den get some information from your blog and after a while, you are ready to start blogging on your blog from a desktop application instead of web.

You may think - “Why should I blog from a desktop application, when I can blog from the web?”. Well, I don’t really need to blog from a desktop application, but I most say it actually seems pretty sweet and easy as I’m sitting here writing this first blog, but back to the question. People that isn’t that much familiar with the web, maybe find it “hard” to blog from the administration via the web and maybe find it easier in a desktop application, as it is more familiar to them.

Let’s try some feature, let’s insert a picture:

It opens up the file browser on my PC here, and not my image folder at my blog. And now that I have inserted the image and selected it, I have some different kinds of possibilities.

Oh my god, this is nice! I just took at screenshot as I’m writing this blog, and just CTRL+V and bang! It’s in the post. That is actually VERY handy :)

Let’s try that again so I can show you what else I can insert:

Wow, I can crop a screenshot too! Sweet. Hmm it’s in Danish, damn, sorry for all the English speaking people out there.

Well, lets’ try inserting a Map:

Also seem to work fine.

That most be all for now, it actually seems to be pretty handy anyway, as a desktop application add much more features than the web based administration.

Now let me publish this post and see if all the images etc. get uploaded to the web too.

So this were the day that I got BlogEngine.Net up and running. I looked at the engine about a year ago, but skipped it again because I at that time just had setup my previous blog and couldn't over come to setup all the style and design again. I'm a programmer, not a designer :)

This week one of my colleages told me that he had downloaded the engine and said that it were so easy to setup and style. Today I had time to try it out and I most say that it is VERY easy to setup! I haven't even read any of te documentation or anything, just did what I guess were needed and it seems to work very well. 

So the setup was easy, but what about the style?

Pretty fast I found the "themes" folder and saw the site.master. If you have worked with ASP.NET before, no further instructions are needed here. All you need it in the "themes/template-name" folder. Couldn't be easier.

So right now I'm a happy developer with a brand new blog.