If you're reading this post on my site (and not through an RSS aggregator) then you're fully aware by now that RobGarrett.com has adored some make up and a pretty dress as part of a new face lift.
My site is not just a pretty face either, the whole blogging engine has been upgraded from
.TEXT to
Community Server 2.0, offering greater functionality. I now have greater control of blog content, reporting, spam and email protection, integrated source code syntax highlighting (as part of a
text box wrapper upgrade), out of the box searching, comment reviewing. The UI is much more advanced of that of .TEXT, and the engine less buggy. Of course, CS is much more than a blogging engine - it's a community engine providing forums, photo album support etc -but for now I am only interested in the blogging subsystem.
Upgrade from .TEXT wasn't as painful as I figured. Moving the data involved upgrading to a CS 1.1 database first, and then a final upgrade to CS 2.0. Most of my effort was spent playing with the skins to get the look and feel that you see.
The only problem I ran into during the upgrade was that CS 2.0 appears to have a CSS bug somewhere that causes skin failure if the selected skin set is not default - so I just changed the default skin files to my desired preference.
The best part of CS 2.0 is that the code base is built on ASP.NET 2.0, so I don't have to concern myself with older versions of the .NET development environment whenever I need to make a tweak to the code. I can also look forward to future upgrades, which I am told will include functionality to interact with Word 2007 (so I'll eventually post with sound grammar and passive voice).
If you're looking for the photo albums then you can find them at
http://robgarrett.com/photos/. I have plans to upgrade the photo album software next, but haven't yet decided if I should use CS or a home-brew system.
Many thanks to
Chris Hynes for his assistance in the upgrade, and to
Assisted Solutions for providing me with hosting service.
Let me know what you think of the new site.