In late 2008 after years of no website/blog/etc, I decided to start one up again. I started to trend towards a .NET-based blog engine and stumbled upon BlogEngine.Net.  It was a great product but I wanted more.

I recently bought an iPad and noticed a WordPress app, which at its core is a simple text editor, and it got me looking beyond .NET-based blogs.  I read up on WordPress, analyzed the community and some of the sites which currently use WordPress and was sold.  What made it infinitely easier was how simple the install was on a clean Windows OS.  I used Microsoft’s Web Platform Installer which provided a complete WordPress install, including the pre-reqs such as MySQL and PHP.

After a few days I was hooked.  The community of theme creators, plugin developers and advocates was amazing.  I began migrating from BlogEngine.NET to WordPress, manually (since I had only posted several times over past year).

After a week, I started to noticed some slowness in the WordPress platform and read into WP-Tuner and Caching (which I will cover in-depth later).  I got plugin crazy and at one point had some two dozens plugins on my pages.  I disabled two plugins and saw my page load time drop from 3.6 seconds to under 1.

So far I am happy with the switch. I choose the .NET platform originally because it was easier for me to get into the core of the code and customize things.  Now with WordPress and its PHP-base, I can still tweak somethings at the theme-level, but I plan to leave the core untouched.