As you may notice, this blog has undergone a massive overhaul.
I set-up the original blog using the open-source, now Microsoft, DasBlog. It came highly recommended to me by a few individuals whom I trust, and I noticed that the product development team was headed by none other than Scott Hanselman, a blogger whom I respect a great deal. After some tinkering, I was able to get DasBlog set up on a local machine, do some basic configuration, and then consider the site ready for publication to my hosting provider.
I contacted my hosting provider, M6.net, well in advance to ensure that they did in fact support DasBlog (they do) and that they were able to provide me the necessary permissions to the directories within the DasBlog file structure. M6, while cheap, uses open source web management tools, that aren’t the easiest to navigate.
I found that when content was sent via FTP to M6, the content being published was using absolute rather than relative links. Therefore, when I attempted to view the content after it had been uploaded, it had no problems. Likewise, when I attempted to make posts or monitor for feedback, I had no problems — DasBlog’s config was redirecting portions of the web parts in page back to my local server while the URL in the browser appeared legit.
Additionally, the permissions on the remote server were set such that if you attempted to post a comment, you were given a link that indicated an error had occurred, and that I had been notified, when in fact, I had not. When I attempted to access that page and post a comment, because I was logged in, no such error occurred.
In short — I’ve done away with DasBlog. While it was worth much more than I paid for it (free), I’m giving BlogEngine.net a go as it doesn’t seem to suffer from the same behind-the-scenes content redirection issues.
For those of you who may have attempted to utilize the old site and were met with challenges, I sincerely apologize.