When we made the recent improvements to our site we realised we  had a bunch of things to post about on our blog. At first we were happy to maintain the blog page as a standard .NET web page that we just updated manually as part of the site. The novelty of that solution wore off pretty quickly though, and the bloggers among you will realise how much we were missing out on by publishing content this way, and how painful it is to redeploy a site just to keep a single ‘blog’ page up to date.

So, our second iteration involved pulling the content dynamically from a locally deployed SQLite database. This approach had the advantage of not needing a full-blown deployment just to push out a new blog post, but didn’t really address all of that missing functionality (comments, an RSS feed, web-based authoring, etc.).  Cue stage 3.

Timed to coincide with the move of our main site, we decided to implement the version of our blog you’re reading now. This time we’ve opted for a self-hosted installation of the grand-daddy of blogging platforms, WordPress, and I must admit that it feels like we’re about done. We’ve learned heaps over the last couple of days getting this platform up and running, installing and customising the awesome K2 theme, getting Google Analytics integrated, sorting the pretty permalinks out on Windows, and bringing a bunch of our content over.

With this version of the blog we get everything you’d expect to get with a WordPress install, and hopes are high that we’ve just lowered the barrier to staying in touch with our users and readers.