Now that I’ve decided to try to host my own blog, its consuming so much of my time. I am looking around to the various tools that can help me blog – dasBlog seems to be the most popular. Even considering writing my own lite blog engine so that it can get integrated into the Konnect Application and keep me connected at all times from my WorkDesk. So what are the features that I’m looking at :-

1.  I should be able to host the blog with minimalistic hazzles – xcopy with maybe a config file should be good enough – so I need someplace that can have .NET 2.0 (or do I!!)
2.  I must be able to syndicate the blogs (get the rss from spaces.msn.com or blogger.com and show) <in which case maybe I can do with just an XML/XSLT implementation that takes the rss feed and renders a nice looking page. This might not even need .NET if we are using MSXML which is there in most machines anyways.
3.  The blog needs to have <what I call> views. So I should be able to see blogs/members/praveen with categories as technology, photography, music etc or I should also be able to go blogs/topics/technology and see praveen, nahas, etc… so I want the categories to be <for want of a better word> “switchable”. This is something that I have not seen in may blog, but when we want to host a corporate blog, we’d also want to render the output by topic so that it’s more pertinent to the company. At the same time, the content is still owned by the person and so it has be available as categories within his blog. Nice thing about this is that if we have blogs/members/praveen with a category personal, it wont <or will be configured not to> appear on the corporate site – so his personal ramblings need not be linked to the company J. I’m assuming that doing the above, is <just like I envisage everything else in Konnect> a matter of keeping the blog entry separate and linking it to the person, the category etc.. It FITS into the overall Konnect theme.
4.  I’d want to use a proprietary binary store. Why? Well not proprietary exactly, but I’d want to take all the data into datasets and binary serialize them. Keeping it in datasets ensures that a move to SQL is easier. At the same time, It ensures that output to XML is easy and the content is not easily (mistakenly) modified. So what I’m not sure of is – do I want to host the dataset and the program to render this (will this impact the content indexing and searching for this content) or do I want to pre-render it and spew out the HTML. I’m all inclined to go with option 1 and revert to option 2 in case I find any issue…<as is apparent, I’m very new to blog hosting and don’t really understand the implications – I hope I’ll know more at the end of this exercise>
5.  For the editing I’m in love with Lutz Roeder’s Writer.NET http://www.aisto.com/roeder/ . This is JUST AWESOME and I plan to use this (modified into a component) inside of Konnect and also as a editor for blogging. Hope to get the blog editor to work sometime this year itself J 

Last post for some time as I’ll have limited access to e-mails. The posts will remain offline <an incentive NOT to post> but I hope to have some more posts before the end of the year. BTW - I’ve never realized how I can post to spaces.msn.com by email INTO a specific category!! If I get that, I might start posting some technical blogs as well.

This I’m guessing will be my final tour/trip of this year. It has to be as it ends on the 30^th of Dec. What a hectic year it has been and I have the feeling that its going to be as hectic - if not more – next year. So Outlook blogging has finally caught up with me. This is sooo much more comfortable than typing content on web pages. As planned, I shall setup my own blog engine (I always have this feeling that if I blog on a public site, I will loose the data someday… even thou I know people who have been blogging for years and not lost their data).

The trip to Seattle was very nice. Met up with Pradeep Singh – a person I’ll always admire and look up to – and was glad to know that Aditi is doing good. It was nice running my thought through his brain. Caught up with Shobs on chat after a long time. Talked to Anuradha, Dimpy and Bhavin. Next time have to catch up with my college {dreamers} gang.

Of course I also finally managed to get my hands on Office 12. Lots of changes, but what really kicks me is the new file format. It opens up the Office data to so much more. From the little I saw of Office Server, SPS too has a lot of promise. I can think of at least 2-3 scenarios which get solved with just some configuration in about 15 mins as opposed to at least a few days of coding. If live.office.com supports SPSv3 and they provide it for India, I can think of at least one SMB signing on to it – mine.

This has been a COLD trip so far. It snowed in Seattle and its about 0 deg in Shanghai. I am in no mood to venture out of my hotel room for anything. But hunger becons….