24 Hours with dasBlog .. reviews from a wordpress refugee

So I’ve spent the past 24 hours with my blog converted to dasBlog. I’m pretty pleased with the blog but I have to say it’s got a long way to go if it’s going to match the power of wordpress. Here’s my take on it so far:

Features in WordPress I find myself missing in dasBlog

Now alot of these features were found with plugins and not built into wordpress so the playing field is not level. I have no doubt if I dig around I’ll find some of these features for dasblog or be able to implement them easily.

• Ability to manage categories – This seems like a no brainer but I don’t see a way to edit category titles within the admin section. This is going to cause problems as I tend to change up my categories after I post them to make them more SEO friendly.
• Themes – Yeah, I was clearly spoiled by wordpress and the hundreds of themes available there. I spent 30 minutes last night converting to dasblog and two hours trying to find a theme.
• Ability to hide a category from the homepage – This was actually a plug-in in the old blog but it’s very useful and a functionality I’m going to have to figure out how to recreate in dasblog.
• Ability to edit the theme from within the admin section of the blog. This made quick edits fairly painless.
• Umm Google Analytics? – I would think this would be built into any web app these days defacto but it’s not in dasBlog.
• Better control over the permalinks – My permalinks in wordpress were very SEOized. In dasBlog you three options,  none, it’ll do and well okay here’s another option since you twisted my arm.
• Lightbox javascript effects for images.

Features I’m enjoying in dasBlog

• Akismet built in. Every blog engine should support Akismet.
• Content Filters – You can define certain regex expressions and text strings and have them replaced on the fly. dasBlog does this out the gate for dasBlog. I had this in wordpress as a plug-in
• Gravatar built in
  
• cocomments and ajax comments, these are cool!
• Daily email activity emails.  These are cool I get to see who’s linking to me, what searches are being done and all kinds of other cool stuff.
• NO DATABASE!  Nuff Said.
• BlogML support.  If you’re wondering how I converted from wordpress to dasblog so easily. This is how. I’ll post a write-up soon enough on my adventures there.
• This is going to sound goofy but it’s ASP.NET based.
• All these crazy services and apis I have in the back end. I love to tinker and these are just begging for me to go learn about them and tinker the heck out of them.
• A pretty cool developer community. I’ve been lurking in their mailing list and these guys love this app and are some pretty well known developers that tinker on this thing in their free time. Really helpful and open. This is the main reason for the move.
• Windows Live Writer Support. I just can’t imagine editing a blog without.

Okay, so it’s been 24 hours and I’ll admit I’m not 100% sold on the move to dasBlog yet. Will Platnick (http://willplatnick.com) did point out one thing though. I never enabled feedburner correctly on my wordpress blog so I had to update my RSS feed url in the url rewrites that I’m trying to get away from. But now I have feeds.jesscoburn.com setup as the new RSS feed and will figure out how to update the blog to include them as the links by default as soon as I can. You’d think this would be an option in dasblog’s back end too.

Jess

With a background in web development and web server administration dating back to 1994, Jess Coburn founded Applied Innovations in 1999. As CEO, he led the company to become a recognized leader in Windows Hosting, specializing in ASP.NET, E-Commerce, and advanced web application hosting. Under Jess's leadership, Applied Innovations became known for making cutting-edge technology accessible and affordable for businesses. Building on this success, Jess expanded his vision by founding QIT Solutions, a managed cloud, IT, and cybersecurity company, where he continues to leverage his extensive industry experience to deliver innovative and secure IT solutions to businesses.

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