Today Microsoft opened up the beta for Wave 4 of the Windows Live Essentials tools including Windows Live Writer.  I have been a long time user of WLW and have come to really enjoy both the simplicity and the power of the tool when writing my blog posts.  I really didn’t see a lot that needed “fixing”, and in this release of WLW it looks like that is exactly what I got – not a lot that has been fixed.

That is not to say that a lot hasn’t changed, because from a UI perspective, it is almost completely different.  The biggest change is that the new live writer now proudly sports a fairly standard ribbon bar just like those found in Microsoft Office.  And just like in Office, I find that the new ribbon bar is somewhat of a step backward.  People are by their natures creatures of habits.  Once we learn how to do something, we don’t want to have to relearn it without a very good reason. 

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I have to say how much I appreciate the great job the new DotNetNuke Blog project team is doing.  For a long time, I blogged fairly regularly on DotNetNuke.com.  Ultimately, I decided to start writing my primary blog on my own site and only occasionally reposting to DotNetNuke.com.  When I moved to my own site, I also decided to switch blogging platforms.  I needed something which supported many of the modern blogging features.  For me the killer feature is Windows Live Writer (WLW) support.  Editing a long blog post in the FCK editor is painful.  Anyone who has ever lost a blog post because of a login timeout knows just how painful it truly can be.  I spend an hour or more writing my blog posts and to have it just disappear is enough to make you cry.

Not only have the blog team answered my desire for WLW support, but they have also been slowly but surely addressing many other pain points with the Blog module.  They are quickly bringing the look of the blog up to modern standards and are retrofitting many key features into the blog.  I am almost ready to dump this other blogging platform and move back to the DotNetNuke blog module.

Now I just need to find some time to write some code to support BlogML and I'll be good to go.  Of course, if the blog team beats me to it that would be great.  In the meantime I have to say well-done and a big kudos to you all.

After posting for a couple of years on my DotNetNuke.com blog, I have decided that it was time to start hosting my blog on a dedicated site.  There are a couple of reasons for this decision.  I have felt a bit constrained on DotNetNuke.com. 

Like much of the online world, the blogosphere is a fast moving environment.  There are dozens of tools aimed at making blogging a much richer experience and that simplify the blogging process.  Social networking sites like Digg and DotNetKicks that are aimed at bloggers have been popping up like crazy.  The DotNetNuke blogging module has generally lagged behind the rest of the blogosphere in supporting recent blogging advances.  I always felt like I was fighting with the module just to get a blog posted much less to take advantage of other blogging features.

In addition to the lack of tool support, the policies we put in place on DotNetNuke.com limited the topics that I was free to discuss.  For the most part, this was not a huge deal, but I was constantly wondering if my posts about woodworking or other personal activities were appropriate.  I do not plan to shift the primary focus of my blog, but I have more interests than just DotNetNuke and I don't want to feel constrained.  I want to blog about my passions, whether it is DotNetNuke, .Net, woodworking or even my weekend bike outings.

I also feel that if I am blogging, that I want to get the most out of the experience.  I want to be able to track my subscribers, to include standard articles, to more fully explore webcasting and podcasting, and in general to have more control and visibility over my blogging experience.

Does this mean that I will no longer blog on DotNetNuke.com?  No.  My plan is to blog to my home blog (http://blog.theaccidentalgeek.com) and then cross post to DotNetNuke.com.  This will allow me to create my blog using a rich blog editor and then just post the resulting HTML on DotNetNuke.com as well.  This will allow me to easily syndicate my entire feed while also making it easy for DotNetNuke visitors to still get to the content.

I asked Scott Hanselman (DasBlog) and Phil Haack (SubText) for recommendations as to which platform would best suit my needs.  As a result I have chosen SubText as my blogging platform of choice moving forward.  Phil and his project team have done a great job of keeping SubText current with most of the features that I really care about and if there is something missing, I am not afraid to jump in and add my custom feature.  Because I am hosting the site myself, I can do that without impacting anyone else.