My first go around with blogging was quite an experience.  My gung-ho intentions and “doer” attitude led to the creation of my own blogging software.  I wouldn’t trade that experience for two Rubik’s cubes, but WOW it was a lot of work and I didn’t have near the features implemented that I truly needed.

Here’s a list of the three best features and why I picked them.

1.  Integration with Windows Live Writer.  This single feature mentioned by Scott Hanselman drove me away from maintaining my own code base and installing dasBlog.  Writing my own RSS feeds and aggregating data was fun, but tweaking that code into the API useable by Windows Live Writer was just daunting.  Frankly, I’d rather be exploring code and other concepts here on my Site Construx blog than conforming to an API that dozens of other platforms already use.  My next statement may be hard to believe, so hold onto your hat… Live Writer is a free download!

2.  Emailed daily summary of statics.  That’s right, every day I get a list of referrers and search engine stats emailed to me.  I created a rule to put them into a folder and at the end of each week I review what the views of Site Construx are really looking at and how they arrived here.  When the powers that be (user searches) and my desires to write coincide with a single topic a smile comes to my face, cause one day, I know I’m going to have an advertiser!

3.  Ease of upgrades.  I was worried that the upgrades would be painful.  In my limited experience (I’ve only done one upgrade) it was seamless.  Just drop the files into the main folder and Viola. 

dasBlog fits really well into my ASP.NET skill set and just gets me excited about all my blogging potential.  If you’re interested in installing dasBlog, the downloads can be found on CodePlex