Last week I stumbled across Blog Engine and installed it to test out its properties.  I immediately liked it's Masterpage based theming and WYSIWYG editor, so I've made the switch from Subtext.  The install process was simple, download the code and then upload onto my web Host into a Vertual directory and grant write access to the App_Data folder.  The only pitfall was that, like my subtext install, I needed to comment out the Trust entry from the web config.  My host, GoDaddy,  doesn't allow application to run in full trust or even to set there trust leval at all.  Since Blogging Engine uses XML files to store it's data by default I all set to start blogging. (Blog Engine also has the option to Use Sql Server as it's data store if you need to get better performance.)

Afer installing I played around with the blog and was impressed by the add entry page.  It had a nice editor as well as an easy method to change post dates and add tags.  All of this was much improved over SubText or even my old Wordpress blog, neither of which had a built in feild to easily enter tags.  Blog engine doesn't appear to have any kind of support for photo galleries like SubText, but either I can keep my old SubText galleries, or perhaps they will be supported by blogging Engine in the future.  As a third option, since Blogging Engine supports Extensions, perhaps someone (even me) could create an extension that could be easily added to subtest.  I plan on adding my [spoiler][spoiler] functionality as an extension in the near future and life will be good.

Creating my theme was relatively easy, I just took the Standard theme and customized to appear the way I wanted.  Blog Engine are based off the standard .Net 2.0 Masterpages, so you start with your master page and you can easily customize your theme without needing to learn a custom skinning system like SubText or WordPress.  The real nice part is that I managed to get Blog Engine running locally so it was easer to code without having to keep uploading to my server.

Importing my old data has proven to be somewhat difficult.  I tried to use the build in blogML importer, but it kept failing, claiming my user name and password were incorrect.  I have my doubts that it is a problem with my typing, since once it actually did add a post from one of my old BlogML files.  I fear it is either the fact that GoDaddy disallows Full Trust, or my content a little screwy from at one time being on Wordpress.  So I've been manually transferring my old posts, and it's a long process, although it is nice to clean up some of the old posts that had been created by Wordpress' bugy editor.

All in all I think Blog Engine is a solid platform and I look forward to finally finishing my Higurashi Reviews.