Alright, I know I'm not supposed to blog about blogging but .. *sigh* alright here I am doing it, oh well. I've updated from BlogEngine.net 1.2 to v1.4.5. Seems to be basically the same but with some corners rounded out and some features added, most notably a sidebar "widgets" implementation and APML filtering. I was particularly looking forward to a severely needed TinyMCE update (stupid thing sometimes made me want to take a baseball bat to my monitor), as well as just being version-synchronized so I can consider adding plug-ins etc. The upgrade went without any issues except one: I had to create my own SQL Server update script because my old v1.2 implementation apparently had a wacky v1.1 schema implementation from my hack of a 1.1->1.2 upgrade, and so a v1.2->v1.3 script I found which I intended to use to then go v1.3->1.4 didn't work. Fortunately, the SQL schema was really simple in v1.1/v1.2 so it only took about 10 minutes to write my script.

I also changed my relative URL from /blog/ to /techblog/. (Redirection should work; if you followed a link to my blog or to any article from another site and got a 404 error, please let me know!!) I might do other types of blogs and my placeholder redirection page at / (site root) needs to be filled in with a vanity site. I have a 4-day weekend, I doubt I'll squeeze it in but hey I might.

On a completely different topic, I just want to say, kudos to Microsoft for stringing together all of the web development essentials (IIS, Visual Studio, ASP.NET MVC, etc) and packaging them up together into one beautiful download-and-install utility, the Microsoft Web Platform Installer. That is a REALLY good idea for both newcomers to the Microsoft platform as well as for veterans who are setting up new machines.