Around Thanksgiving 2008 I realized that I hadn't done much with my personal website since 2003, almost five years. I wanted to do something, but didn't know where to start. Back in 2003, I used WordPress on a $10/month web host for a short time. While that was nice, I never kept up with the site and it went away about a year later. Prior to 2003, I never had a site that was powered by a blog platform, it was mainly static HTML with some Perl/CGI sprinkled in here and there.
I haven't really done much with the blog platforms since they exploded in number, and features, several years ago. After researching and installing a few blog platforms such as Joomla and SubText, I stumbled upon BlogEngine.NET. I can't remember exactly where, but a comment on a blog pointed me to CodePlex where I started reading up on the project.
After a quick download and copy over to IIS, I had BlogEngine.NET 1.4.5 up and running within 10 minutes. After playing with it over the course of a few weeks, here are some of the reason I like it and recommend it for the personal blog.
(1) Extensions
I came across this post, 5 Things I Love About BlogEngine.NET, and read up on Extensions. Once I read up on the framework and saw an example, I was sold. It is empowering to be able to extend events like Post.Save without having to dig around the developer's code and recompile. There is a growing list of events that anyone can extend. I plan to create an extension of Post.Save() that creates a PDF rendition of a post when saved. (Right now I am using iTextSharp with some mixed results.)
(2) Open Source C# / 3rd Party Integration
BlogEngine.NET is based on C#. I tried Joomla and some other PHP-based blog engines. While those platforms perform fine, I enjoy being able to open up the hood and dig around in the engine.
As shown with the image on the right from Visual Studio, I really like being able add third party solutions/DLLs easily into my website. For example, on this site I pull in ASP.NET Ajax 2.0, BlogEngine.Core (the source of BlogEngine.NET), iTextSharp for PDFs and a .NET-based JSON utility for the Google Site Search.
(3) XML Datastore Out of the Box
BlogEngine.NET comes out-of-the-box with XML as the datastore. I understand the need for relational databases and their flexibility, performance and power, especially as the number of posts grow. But right out of the box, I didn't need that. I like the simplicity to see my posts stored as XML on the hard drive. I know the performance hits, but I will take the performance hit to use XML for now. If I post a lot, then I can migrate to SQL Server, which is supported.
(4) Windows Live Writer Support
I only started using Windows Live Writer in late-November 2008, but I really like the product, especially the plug-ins. It's interesting that, while we move to more and more thin clients, a blog writer moves from the web to the desktop. I am still in learning mode for WLW, but I like writing on the desktop instead of on a webpage.
Everyone has there own reasons for liking a blog platform. If you're looking for a platform based on .NET, I strongly recommend BlogEngine.NET. My advice is to take a few days/weeks and test the ones you like to see if it does what you want.
At the end of the day, it's your site and the blog platform should make things easy for you.