I’ve been wanting to move to a .NET based blog package for a while now. I’m currently on pMachine, an old, PHP-based freeware product that isn’t architected super well and is hard to customize or extend. I’m a .NET guy now and it’d be nice to be able to do some cool .NET things on my site, so I’d like a .NET blog.

I started looking at dasBlog, but I don’t think that’s the way for me. It’s got some nice features, but the code on the back end was inherited, patched, fixed, updated, added to, and jimmied together to make it what it is today. It’s not terribly well documented, and looking at how it works from a code perspective is less than clear. Even just trying to install it locally to see if I liked it wasn’t too straightforward and ended with me talking to a couple of other dasBlog users who had this odd proprietary knowledge that they got from still other dasBlog users. I can’t be dealing with that.

Stu and I thought we might just start writing our own blog engine. We went so far as to get a domain name and a project space on SourceForge, but the time required to get the thing going is a little more than we’ve had to allocate to it.

Now I’m really thinking about Subtext, though. With the 1.9 release, they’ve updated to .NET 2.0, they’re getting their unit test coverage up, and from what I can tell, the templates use user controls (like master pages) so I wouldn’t have to deal with the odd template/macro language that most blog engines make use of. I’m all about that.

Granted, I haven’t actually downloaded it and looked at it yet to see if it’s any better than dasBlog behind the scenes. But I like what I’ve seen so far.