Early Tech Publications
In porting my blog to Statiq, I was forced to revisit a whole lot of content, most of which is more than a decade old. As part of this review, I cleaned up old broken links, of which there were many. I would estimate that 60% of the web links I had from my original blog pages were to sites or content that no longer existed. This says a lot about how the web has evolved and how much content turns over as time progresses.
Beckshome on Statiq
After 7 years of being dormant, the beckshome.com blog hummed back to life over the past month. It started with a full .NET hosted blog, moved to Wordpress and then was exported from Wordpress to create static content in 2015, which is where things stood for the past 7 years. I decided to go with a static site generator to modernize the site, specifically with Statiq, which is a .NET-based static site generator.
About Me
I’ve been blogging for 4 years now and never have filled out the “About Me” section on my blog. I’ve had good intentions for a while but just never got around to it because my vision involved scanning in a bunch of older materials. I’ve finally carved out a bit of time to update the default blurb with suitable material, which you can find here. Unless you’ve known me for a long while, you’re sure to find out an interesting new thing or two. Give it a look!
WordPress on IIS7
I had long planned the move from the .NET-based DasBlog blogging engine to WordPress but just couldn’t seem to make the time to complete the move. I finally pulled the trigger and cutover to WordPress a couple of weeks ago. The process was not nearly as painful as I imagined and I’m now beginning to reap the rewards of working on a blogging platform that’s more broadly integrated into the Web ecosystem. This blog entry is a collection of the key technical takeaways from my migration. Hopefully they will be helpful for other people looking to migrate to WordPress, especially on the Microsoft IIS platform.
Wordpress for Business Bloggers
After more than a year-long hiatus, this entry marks my return to blogging. One of the things I decided to do to get myself back into the spirit of blogging was to change my blogging engine. I made the move from the .NET-based DasBlog to the more mainstream WordPress platform. I will be providing more information about the migration process (specifically, WordPress on IIS 7), helpful tools and tutorials, and useful WordPress plugins in an upcoming blog post.
Adding Flickr's Flash Photo Viewer to Your Blog
One of my original intents of registering the beckshome.com domain name was to publish photos of my new baby son or daughter. That was two years and two daughters ago and, until this weekend, photos were nowhere to be found on my blog. I host my blog on the Windows platform and had no desire/time to do any of the following: (a) buy a separate package for image management; (b) cobble together an ASP.NET solution to manage my photos; (c) switch blogging software to a tool like Community Server that has integrated photo management. Furthermore, I already manage my photos on Flickr and I’m more than happy with the service, user experience, and the cost-benefit. What I really needed was a way to integrate my existing Flickr photos into my current .NET-based blog (DasBlog). The pursuit of this goal is what this blog entry is all about.
DasBlog Installation
After a while searching for blogging hosts or blogging software for .NET, I finally settled on Scott Hanselman’s DasBlog. The installation of DasBlog proved to be extremely easy; involving the simple extraction of a Web project into a folder (virtual or otherwise) under which one intends to host. Furthermore, storage is all file-based so that no database interaction is required whatsoever. All of the expected amenities such as rich HTML editing (see below), a variety of skins, and a plethora of configuration options are offered through Das Blog as well.