UrbanPotato got tiring. It’s tiring to look at and tiring to manage. Comments died long ago due to spam. Uploading pictures and editing content is a chore. So it languished and I moved most of my updates to Facebook. But Facebook has its limitations. It’s hard to write witty prose in your status updates. It’s hard to have a creative outlet when your look and feel is dictated by someone else. With Facebook, I belong to one of the many. It’s great to be part of the group, but it’s hard to have a unique voice.
Today, UrbanPotato gets an update. Gone is the hand-crafted-in-another-life “LiveCast” blog engine I wrote so many moons ago. I’m too busy these days to update that code. In its place I’m now running the excellent BlogEngine.NET, originally written by Mads Kristensen and now maintained a horde of talented developers. It's flexible and simple enough that I could easily make it do what I want, and I can post using Word or Live Writer instead of a bad web interface.
I also wrote a plug-in for Windows Live Photo Gallery using WPF so I never have to upload another picture using a one-file-at-a-time web interface. Hurrah.
UrbanPotato also got a styling update. This style isn’t designed by me. I like it, but it’s not really that personal. Now that the site is up I will be spending some time in Photoshop designing a style that is a little more to my liking.
If you look carefully, you’ll notice that some posts are missing. All of my “software” specific posts are gone. That’s because I’m moving them to a new site called PocketSilicon. PocketSilicon runs the same software as UrbanPotato but it has different content. I always felt a little conflicted mixing code posts and personal posts. It felt both impersonal and unprofessional. Now I can keep things separate and not have to worry that MSDN’s blog aggregator is telling the world what Cole had for breakfast.
Anyway, I’d love to hear feedback on what everyone thinks of the changes. Comments are back now, and I was even able to salvage old comments from the previous database so I have some to start with.