I am really impressed with DasBlog, which is a free ASP.NET Blog Application that is perfect for running a personal blog. I wish it was available when I started this blog, but sadly it wasn't and now I am left in the dark ages on this old, unsupported, and left-for-dead .Text blog engine ;)
DasBlog continues to have more and more functionality as time goes on and has a very attractive set of features to fight off various types of referral spam, comment spam, and trackback spam as well as support for new syndication formats, like Atom 1.0.
If you want a really easy-to-use, feature-rich, and simple-to-install ASP.NET blog engine for your website, I highly recommend DasBlog. It has a new release, v1.8RC1, that you can get started on today. Here are some of the new features per Scott Hanselman:
New Features of Note
- Anti-Spam Features
- Automatic Referral and Trackback blacklist update
- CAPTCHA for non-admin users
- Logging and display of Comment IP addresses and resolved Hostnames for Admins
- DasBlogUpgrader can strip spam from existing content folders
- Support for rel="nofollow"
- Ability to delete referrals and trackbacks directly from the Admin UI
- Security Features
- HttpOnly cookies
- Admin access auditing
- SMTP Authentication for outgoing mail
- Syndication Features
- Improved RSS Comments support for SharpReader and RSS Bandit
- Upgraded Atom support from 0.3 to Valid Atom 1.0. Syndication permalink changes but 301 is issued.
- RSS 2.0 validates via FeedValidator.
- Ability to mark entries as "syndicated" or not. Entries can appear on the site but not in RSS/Atom.
- Performance Features
- Search Highlighting is optional now
- Referrals are logged but not stored in XML by default. Configurable.
(This has huge performance benefits for high traffic sites.)
- DasBlog Upgrader can optionally remove all referrals.
(Again with high traffic sites some folks had 5meg XML files full of referrals)
- Theme templates are now cached in memory.
- Content Features
- Ability to pre- and post-date entries
- Permalinks based on Title and Date optional: 2005/06/06/title.aspx
- Latest build of Free Text Box including ability to upgrade FTB without upgrading DasBlog.
- Text Editor (FTB) supports FireFox
- Blog Statistics macro
- Mail-To-Weblog continues to improves. Works with Thunderbird.
- Extensibility Features
- Custom Macro Plugin model without recompiling DasBlog
- Theme Features
- DasBlog now ships with 16 themes and a Theme Combo to change between them.
- New theme.manifest file makes themes and image assets more portable.
Download it here.
Drinking: Green Peony Green Tea
Listening To: One More Time by Daft Punk