My first inclination when planning this site was to roll my own blogging suite; I even convinced the admin to upgrade the server to .NET 3.5 so I could use LINQ. My previous experiences with content management systems left me turned off to the idea of pre-defined layouts and constricting plug-in API’s. I wanted to be able to include every feature to take my fancy at the drop of a hat (and the upload of a .cs file). I wanted to use every AJAX/XHTML/CSS trick in the book as well as new ones that come along. If there’s one thing I knew, it’s that I would much too quickly find the bounds of the likes of Mambo, Drupal, and Joomla.

Unfortunately, I can’t design the paint job for a barn. I have the knowledge and tools for great functionality. Great looks? Not so much.

My next thought was to take an existing open source blogging package and adapt the theming engine and any attractive themes. Luckily for me, the first Google result for “.net open source blog engine” was BlogEngine.NET. A quick peek through the project showed that there has been a lot of progress since my forays in to open source CMS. I was sold. I dropped any ideas of creating my own software and installed the entire package.

So far, I couldn’t be happier. Instead of imposing an architecture on you, you are presented with what could be considered a reference application, and you’re free to go to town with whatever ASP.NET techniques you want. Theming ASP.NET master pages. You can use your own server and user controls without any restrictions. And since it’s open source, you can add whatever core functionality you want. In short, it’s what I like to imaging I would have written.

Back to the core issue of design, BlogEngine.NET comes with a few basic themes, and there is a nice, if a bit anemic, theme gallery on their site (though it was broken when I tried to use it). It turns out, however, that there is a thriving community of free XHTML/CSS site designs. There is a huge selection available at (and significant overlap between) oswd.org and opendesignes.org. They’re realeased under the Creative Commons Attribution License 2.5, so you’re free to do whatever you want with them (including commercial uses), as long as you give credit to the original authors.

I also found an interesting site called Disqus, which allows you to implement threaded comments without any local resources. Additionally, it allows users to track comments and reputation across multiple sites. There is a similar service called Intense Debate, though I went with Disqus since it’s integrated with FriendFeed.

There are, of course, many other useful services, such as FeedBurner for stats on your RSS, Google Analytics for stats on your site, and Fli

ckr for images. I plan to add more to the site as I come across them.