my gift to myself - a new blog!!!

for the past three years, i've been using my own homemade content management application to blog.  as part of my new years resolution to relax more effectively, i went to the open-source community to see if i could give myself a few days of spare time by not reinventing the wheel in replacing my blog engine, and i couldn't be happier with the results.  i installed the blogengine.net application on my website, and this is the result - a far more fun blog to use and to browse than i could possibly have crafted myself over this holiday break!

i wanted to include a tool that would enable user comments and ratings, and this engine came with those features built-in!  i wanted a tag-cloud so that you could browse the postings by keyword and subject matter - and that was built-in also!  i wanted a site that i could tool in .NET and reskin in CSS, and that was no problem either!  and i wanted a new look and feel that was more glossy and less dark and gloomy and i managed to use all the time savings coding to make that happen also!

this new site has so many goody features - even i don't know all the things that it does yet!  i imported the last year's worth of entries to get a feel for how the thing should work, and it's super-fantastic (in my humble opinion).  i have to apologize a bit for the immense tag-cloud though - i will try and trim that down to a more reasonable collection of keywords as time goes by.  in the meantime however - holy crap!!!  i love it so much (as only a programming geek can)!!

on a personal note, the holidays have been good.  i've relaxed and taken things at a very comfortable pace.  i've had lots of projects (replacing my blog engine being at the forefront of these) to do this week, and i'm getting through them spectacularly - more on that in subsequent posts.  life still isn't quite perfect, but it's mine, and i'm doing it the way that i want and choose - and things rarely get better than that.

- g

song of the day for making things go your way: heaven in my hands, level 42 (with one of the best bass players ever to grace the face of the earth, mark king).