Sweet! I'm only two years late to the party! I just upgraded the server that hosts my site.

About a year ago, I attended an MSDN event in my area and won the boobie prize: 12 months of free hosting from an vendor at the event. I had been hosting my site on my company's web servers, so that seemed like a good opportunity to leave the nest and test my skills in the wild. Plus, the price was right.

Man, did that suck.

On Wednesday, I signed up for 12 months of hosting with DiscountASP.Net. They advertised on www.asp.net, and had a lot of good word-of-mouth referrals that eached my ears.

In the matter of about an hour, I did the following:

• Completed an online transaction with DiscountASP.net
• Accessed my new site through the Control Panel provided by DiscountASP.Net
• Downloaded the latest dasBlog bits for ASP.Net 2.0, medium trust
• Uploaded the dasBlog bits to my new site
• Switched the DNS servers to my new ISP
• Moved the content folder from my old host to DiscountASP.Net
• Minor configuration to secure and customize my blog

I'll have you know that I have not yet contacted DiscountASP.Net by phone or e-mail, nor have I had to read their online help documents. The entire process was smooth as silk. I was shocked. My previous personal and professional experiences have always left me in need of some type of resolution.

This is how it should be — DiscountASP.Net has done a great job and I'm grateful.

I was also relieved by the ease of my dasBlog upgrade. I was about a year off the head in their source code repository. The new version has several sweet skins out-of-the-box and they're easy to customize.

I highly recommend dasBlog for any type of blogging solution — it's a rock solid open source system under active development. Now that I'm 99% out-from-under of my enormous eight month project, I'd love to saunter over to that open source project and try my hand at helping the dasBlog dev team. The weekend is just starting, Le Wife is out of town, and I'm dinking around on a new laptop with Vista. Can't ask for a better set up than that!

Sweet goodness. Hearts and bunnies, as The Wife and her sister would say.

I'm authoring this post from Windows Live Writer, a Windows client application that provides a place to author a post offline and then send 'er up the tubes to my blog site.

DasBlog has long provided alternatives to the HTML form based post, such as email based submission, but I've never delved into them. I read about Windows Live Writer on a couple of posts, nothing too detailed, just a quick mention and on a lark I looked it up online.

It seemed interesting, lots of features too. I downloaded a small .msi file, and it was running great in seconds on my laptop. Right off the bat, it asked for the URL to my blog and my credentials. It proceeded to chat with my blog to learn some things about it; I didn't have to do anything.

Sweet!

Then a window opens and prompts me to enter a blog post. I think I'm going to really like this.

Whoa! We're out there now. I just uploaded the lastest nightly build (dasBlog v1.9.6235.0) to my site. The planet looks so very small from here.

I've been having some problems with a macro in the templates. Doesn't seem to matter which template, I'm using Project84 right now by default, but when I post a new entry, the exception in the template macro probits the posts from displaying; just the empty skin appears. Let's hope these new bits solve that problem.

Be sure to visit all the options under "Configuration" in the Admin Menu Bar above. There are 16 themes to choose from, and you can also create your own.