Shawn Oster

One criticism we get as a company is that on the day Silverlight 1.0 was launched we didn’t do a massive refactoring of all Microsoft media-based or media-containing sites to use Silverlight.  Since dry humor doesn’t often translate via blog I’m poking some fun at our critics with that statement.  Any technology transition takes time, even one we believe strongly in like Silverlight.  Given skill sets, market requirements and different time-frames it was never that surprising that the previous Zune.net still used Flash.  It just made sense at the time.

Today is a different story though, today we can count one more site as having come into the Silverlight fold, Zune.net. (This is just an excerpt, click the title for the full post)

If you were expecting enginefour.com and are now on shawnoster.com don’t worry, it’s all part of my mad plan.  Mad as in these little things really shouldn’t take as long as they do sometimes.

I’m redirecting all my old enginefour.com blog traffic over to shawnoster.com (which is where you should now be).  This is also a sneaky way to make sure all my old slugs (the bit after the domain name that uniquely identifies each post) have a corresponding one on my new site.

I created a “Hey I’m moving” post over there that will now redirect to *this* post here if all the regex’s line up :)  Back to our regularly scheduled broadcast.

Been quite on my blog lately and of all reasons it was because I just wasn’t happy with my old theme.  Lame I know yet if I’m not excited about how it looks then I’m not really compelled to write.  So I went searching for a cool theme for my old blog engine BlogEngine.NET and while a few grabbed me they all had some pretty basic flaws.  I believe using bulleted lists, quotes, proper headings, etc. help in the digestion of information and if the formatting for those items are off then a simple post can look like a train wreck, at least to my eyes.

Long story short I keep bumping up against the Oxite “theme” and decided the best way to get that theme was to switch to Oxite as my engine.  I’ve been super busy lately with all sorts of ninja projects and so every time I hit a roadblock in installing Oxite on GoDaddy I’d stop and move onto real work.

Well, today I finally got it all working and I can start flooding my blog with new posts once again.  The irony being of course that most people just use a feed reader (FeedDemon being my favorite) to read blog entries so all of that deep theme searching was probably in vain.

I want to note that nothing is wrong with BlogEngine.NET and if I had spent as much time fixing the CSS of the themes I liked as I did installing Oxite then I’d still be using it.  I’m also addicted to updates and while BlogEngine.NET development hasn’t exactly stalled things over there seem a bit stale.  For example the official release is 1.5 yet the home page still calls it a RC.