It's after 5am and I'm still up. Why? I just completed standing up the blog portion of my new site and I'm pretty excited.

The full site migration is far from over, but the bones are there, and the blog content has been all moved over.

New Site

My blog (first picture below) has had roughly the same look for a number of years now. I've updated the background and the header graphic, but everything else has been pretty static. The platform was also getting pretty old and crusty. My web site (second picture) has been the same since around 2003 when I did the last overhaul. It is a regular asp.net 2.0 site (started on asp.net 1.0) that is both hard to maintain and publish to. Plus, I get fun things like it freaking out (see photo at right..er bottom - need to fix that style) because I didn't handle some exception case correctly.

One of the more exciting things for me is to have a lab section on the new site. Blog posts are very time-oriented, and I needed something that would transcend that and be more project-focused. The lab is just stubbed out for now, but this is where you'll find the interesting projects I've been working on.

New Platform

I'm in the process of completely switching over to Umbraco CMS. Umbraco is an ASP.NET, open source content management system. While there are some tools to help, it's not really a blogging platform. Turning it into one has taken me a while. I still have some things to go (like trackbacks, some image formatting in posts, and spiffing up the comments a bit), but most of the hard work is done.

The folks on http://our.umbraco.org forums have been awesome in helping me diagnose issues and get up and running on the platform. Umbraco truly has a great community.

I wrote the converter code to move from Community Server to Umbraco (with Blog4Umbraco 4), as well as the http module to efficiently retain all the old community server urls. I'll post the interesting bits from those in a future post.

New Domain

While the story behind my old domain name was interesting, the name itself was really wearing on me. I went on a search for a new domain name that would capture the essence of my interests. To that end, I picked . It's short, memorable, and it speaks commodore. For all the details regarding the new name, check out the about page on the new site.

I'm looking forward to continuing work on this platform. It's great to have my two sites finally unified into a single platform that is easy to modify (both in source and out of source) and easy to publish to.