So, thanks to Mark my problem with Omea Reader has been solved by using Feeddemon with a Newsgator online account. I'm only a few days into my trial of the service but it does what I need - which is a cloud-located synchronised set of feeds and rich(ish) client experience that allows me to organise the incoming feeds. Fabulous. Omea Reader has served me well and I'm sorry to see it go though.

Next up on my hit list of technical spring cleaning is this blog. I was looking to move it to the latest version of dasBlog so I grabbed the bits and pieces and installed under my local machine. I like dasBlog but I've always thought that it could be simpler, and that it just doesn't do what I want easily enough, so having struggled to get it working under IIS7 (ah, what happened to the good old days when IIS just let you do anything to it...) I figured there had to be a better way.

I know, I know, I could use Wordpress and I have indeed dabbled with it as a self-install - I really like it and its widget system - and I could also use Typo which is actually my favourite blogging engine but I'm simply not good enough at Unix and Apache and so on to keep a Rails site running reasonably. Besides, I feel that there should be a superlative .NET offering out there (for some reason I'm not a fan of Community Server) that just does a 'Good Job Of Blogging'.

Anyhow, I'm going to throw my hat into the ring with BlogEngine.NET. Why? Well, the objectives of this project by Mads are what I'd like to have - a simple, not overcooked blogging engine. I downloaded v1.0 a couple of weeks ago and thought it was pretty good and then v1.1 yesterday which is even better and adds things such as support for Windows Live Writer

As an aside, I think that WLW is turning into a great product, though I agree with Mark's comments about MSI installs for plug-ins. I prefer the 'drop the assembly in a folder' approach, though I'd like to see a 'proper' framework to provide this flexibility.

I also like the controls, and template/macroing technique included with with engine. I'll need to play around with templates a bit, and maybe lose this nice Vista-style for a while (or forever given my HTML/CSS skills).

So, you'll be able to see those changes this week at some time. Good job Mads and team.