Most of you probably won't be able to readily tell, but I have finally decided to move away from the Community Server product for dustyd.net
I have a love/hate relationship with CS, however, most of the love side of it is in regards to the architecture. I've learned so much by digging into the CS code, that I felt that it was only appropriate that I ran my site with it. After all, what better way to become more familiar with the CS codebase, than to implement dustyd.net using it!
Problem is, CS truly is overkill for a site like mine: single blog, single gallery configuration. The skinning is amazing, but I found myself struggling for hours just to get fonts changed. Again, more familiarization with the product would certainly aleviate that, but alas I was tired of screwing with it.
In the end, I have decided to roll my own blog/gallery, using ASP.NET 2.0. Really, it's the only rational choice. Give's me a chance to play around with 2.0, and cleans up the code significantly!. It should NOT be that hard to make something look like you want it to :-)
The blog is almost 100% implemented, minus some more advanced features like ratings. The photo gallery is soon to follow. I know I've promised the photos for some time now, but this is truly a step in a positive direction. Needless to say, I'm VERY excited to get my photos back up and open to the public.
In the coming days, I will post in more detail regarding the actual implementation of the site. ASP.NET 2.0 is amazing, let me just preface by saying that.
Stay tuned...
P.S. As part of this, I was able to fix the RSS feed's url using URL rewriting, so anyone (myself included), that subscribed to the feed using the dustyd.net/Blog/rss.aspx link, your feed should be working now!