I like BlogEngine.Net. I really do. This blog runs on it. But I have decided to pursue my wine blog on Blogger. The reason is basic and simple. I want to use Google's Adsense on my wine blog, Vino HAG. Maybe one day I will be one those people that will have such a huge following that all I need to do to pay my bills is blog. That would be almost as good as playing golf for a living.

You would think that BlogEngine would make adding Adsense to the blog easy, but to date, I have not been able to make it work. I am using version 1.3.1 and they are currently on version 1.4. Frankly, I am tired of trying to get it to work. I know for a fact, that by the time I might be able to figure it out, I could have already had my wine blog up and running with Blogger and Google's Adsense and Analytics. As a matter of fact, that is exactly what I did.

So why did I ever use BlogEngine.Net in the first place? Hmmm... a few reasons. It looked really slick and I'm a programmer (.Net) by profession, it was free, runs on .Net, and fairly easy to set up and get rolling. It was actually fun learning the things BlogEngine.Net could do too. Since it is open source, many people had made add ons like the Slide Show extension. Someone actually made an Adsense extension too, but alas, I could never get it to work.

Anyway, if you like wine and get a chance, check out Vino HAG.

Bill Beckelman created a photo slideshow extension for BlogEngine.Net and also posted instructions on how to use this extension for BlogEngine. Nice! I diligently followed his excellent guide and this is what you get: 

Wow, that was pretty sweet and TOTALLY painless. Granted I am a programmer by profession, but this was EASY. Looking forward to using this more and learning about the other extensions. 

I upgraded my blog from 1.2 to the current version, 1.3.1.0, yesterday. The upgrade is fairly painless and during the upgrade process, I found out there are a bunch more themes available and whole bunch of extensions I didn't even know existed. I'm looking forward to trying some of them out like the Slideshow Photo Gallery built using SilverLight. 

I took 2 photography courses in college to make my art requirement. I have alway been interested in photography because it was a way to "artfully" express myself. I can't draw, I can't paint, I can't write poetry or write songs. I can definitely frame a picture and I have a very fast trigger finger, so by default, photography became my outlet for expressing myself "artfully". I LOVE photography.

After living here in Houston for 2 years I finally (what took me so long) decided to do a search for "Houston Photography". It turns out there is a very strong and active community here. I found Photine, which is a wonderfully written blog. For some reason it is extremely engaging. I'm betting because there's true genuiness (is that word?). Anyway, the author is a photog and I've followed her links to other Houston photogs: CyberToad, Martin, and of course Photine's. One day, when I get the time and the nerve, I'll post my photos too.

Random thoughts... I make my living on the web. I'm a web programmer, yet it never ceases to amaze me how cool the Web is and easy it is to connect; with blogs, with twitter, facebook, etc.

This blog runs on BlogEngine.NET and I tried to use the Import Tool to import my existing blog on Blogger. This for whatever reason did not work. I then read the forums and found out some other people were able to import their blog from WordPress. I also found out that WordPress is able to import blogs from Blogger...

ding! ding! ding! We have a winner. I created a WordPress blog, imported my Blogger blog into WordPress, then used the import tool to import my blog from WordPress. It worked like a charm except I could only import the 10 latest postings and no images or links work... hmmm...

I read more forum stuff and found out I needed to change the "Reading Options (WordPress Admin)" to "Show at most:" equivalent to or greater than the number of blog posts I have. So now I can grab ALL of my blogs, but alas, without the pics or links... not useful. Oh well...