Initial Impressions of DasBlog

My initial impressions are mostly positive. If you’ve not heard of it, DasBlog is an open source BSD-like licensed blog engine (and they have a really cool image on their front page). It is written in C# for .NET, though I think it has been ported to Mono.

I’ve been considering leaving Blogger and consolidating my blogging with my homepage (www.ericsowell.com -- yes, it is somewhat sparse in content at this point). I figured that if I go with this solution I’ll ultimately have more flexibility.

But why DasBlog? Several reasons:

1. It is done in .NET and is open source, which means (in theory) it should be easy to modify if I feel the need to do so.
2. It was created by Clemens Vasters, who is a rather eccentric-mannered programmer but really seems to know his stuff. I saw him at Tech-Ed last year and heard him on .NET Rocks (which is a good .NET talk show, BTW), and I’m pretty impressed.
3. It’s got an easy data store to deal with: xml. Don’t have to setup a database to run it. Good old text files. This is probably the biggest reason.

The only negative that I’ve seen so far is the admin screens for the available skins (but only the admin screens) aren’t very Firefox friendly. But, I can change that (see point 1 above).

Downloading and compiling is a cinch. Very rarely do I download an open-source project that is easy to get started. It doesn’t seem terribly well documented, but it is easy to get going anyway. If I get any more thoughts on the matter, I’ll be sure to post them.