The latest release of BlogEngine.net  was officially released yesterday after spending a week or so in Release Candidate state and it’s version 1.5. There’s a couple of great new items like nested comments, improved Metaweblog API which works great with Windows Live Writer as well as some performance tune-ups. Is it worth upgrading from 1.4.5? You bet! You should do it now as a matter of fact!

However, the official release (build 1.5.07), even after spending time as a RC, had a few minor problems, none of which are deal breakers in my opinion. More...

After the Daytona 500 all I want to say is that Dale Jr. should have been parked by NASCAR or at least penalized for aggressive driving after causing that pile up yesterday! Had it been anyone else, they probably would have. Unfortunately, NASCAR doesn’t want to upset Jr. Nation (read REVENUE MAKERS) or else ticket sales and TV ratings would plummet.

I’ve been looking for a way to display a gallery or slideshow of images that I’ve taken over the years here on my site and unfortunately BlogEngine.net doesn’t have one built in (yet). I started doing some research and found a really cool slideshow created by Vertigo and powered by Microsoft Silverlight, but getting it to work with BlogEngine.net seemed a little over my head as far as programming in .NET is concerned. Fortunately, Bill Beckelman created an extension for BlogEngine.net that allows you to publish the slideshow in a post, and someone posted on Bill’s blog on how the code could be modified so that the extension would work on a page instead of a post.

So that’s how my Slideshow came about. It’s just some pictures of my brother’s wedding and two trips to Bristol Motor Speedway for the NASCAR races. I’ll be adding more albums to it in the future as I figure out which pictures I want to post. The link is on the right under the Pages section, or you can just click here.

Thanks for taking a look!

As if BlogEngine.net wasn’t easy enough to use, I happened to stumble across a nifty little application that has a pretty good following in the blogging community called Windows Live Writer. Yes, I admit to being still “wet behind the ears” when it comes to blogging so excuse my excitement, but with this application I no longer need to log in to my blog and create a post. More...

I decided to get into the Holidays by decorating my office at work, and I figured if I'm going to decorate I might as well go all out and hang some lights along with some cool Santa stuff. My wife (MGDQueen), who's definitely the decorator in the family, wanted to help and so we spent some time over the weekend dressing up my office. We hung some Christmas lights, decorated my desk to look like a giant gift, hung a Santa Claus on the door, even put a little tree (with lights!) on my desk. More...