PiRootOfPi Blog By: Dave Anderson Shreveport, LA

After months of consideration, and help from my friend Chris Benard, I have switched my blog engine to WordPress.

As a Microsoft .NET programmer, I originally chose Community Server Blog Engine and WebHost4Life Windows Hosting. This solution allowed me to easily write custom .NET applications for this website. Unfortunately, this scenario had several negatives as well.

1. Community Server is now bloated. When I originally created the blog, I used Community Server’s predecessor .Text, which was a lightweight and an excellent blog engine for a single blog website for personal use. Community Server has become a commercial suite designed for enterprises running multiple blogs, forums, image gallery, file libraries and more. This is much, much more than I needed for this humble little site.
2. Each Community Server Update required massive changes. The newest version of Community Server required that I redesign my theme, as the CSS had changed significantly from prior versions. Since I highly customized my previous theme, I was not looking forward to doing all of this work again.
3. Community Server has a smaller community. As Community Server’s focus has moved completely almost completely towards commercial solutions, I found there were far less themes and plugins available for community server than for WordPress.
4. WordPress is simply better. WordPress just seems to be a more highly polished product than Community Server. Making changes to the site is incredibly easy. Plugins for anything imaginable are readily available. Although I still love Windows Live Writer, making blog posts from the a web browser is not nearly as painful as it was with Community Server. Finally, although I have not tested Community Server 2007, WordPress is far more standards compliant than Community Server 2.x.
5. WebHost4Life’s custom interface was difficult to use. In my opinion WebHost4Life’s custom tools were hard to use for anything slightly out of the normal. I repeatedly had to put in support requests for things that would be easy to accomplish in Microsoft Internet Information Services, but were impossible in their custom admin software. To their credit, they were very fast in responding to support requests, but it did not make up for the annoyance of having to file the request in the first place.
6. Windows hosting is expensive. Although the ability to write custom web applications for the site in .NET was a great bonus, I could no longer justify the price. I chose WebHost4Life because they seemed the cheapest despite the problems with their software. Even though they are the cheapest Windows Host I could find, they offered less bandwidth, less storage space, and less options for a higher price than my new host. Additionally, almost anything I would want to add to the site is available as plugins for WordPress.

I want to personally thank Chris Benard for helping me with the site migration.

I am very satisfied with WordPress.

Due to strong recommendations by Chris Benard, Courtney Malone, and Seth Gholson, I decided to give Windows Live Writer a try. I am using it to create the blog post you are currently reading and I must say the product is excellent. Creating an entry with Live Writer is a much more pleasant than using Community Server’s built-in blog post editor. No need to enter HTML mode to insert images or a quotes the way I want. No need reason to copy the post into word for spell checking. No need to manually clean up the extra line breaks Community Server adds to the the end of posts created in Mozilla Firefox. Live writer handles all of this and much, much more. I might even post more frequently now that creating new posts is such a painless process.

I highly Windows Live Writer to anyone who maintains their own blog. Give it a try, I promise you will not regret your decision.

Hello everyone,
I know I have not made a post in a while. I have been pretty busy as of late.

Luckily, Carla Anderson, my wife, has now started a blog of her own.

Lately, she has been posting far more frequently than I.
So if you are interested in what is going on in our lives and can’t find it here please check out her blog:

carlaanderson.net.

My friend Courtney has discovered a solution to the issue of network speed reduction while playing sound in Windows Vista.

Check out Courtney’s Solution

On Monday, I purchased the refurbished Sandisk Sansa e250 from Woot.

Imagine my surprise when it arrives and I see this:

Seriously?
Was it necessary to emboss a relatively huge chromed “REFURB” on the back?

Several people I have shown the unit to actually thought “REFURB” was the model name.

If anything should be embossed and chromed, shouldn’t it be the Sandisk logo for advertisement purposes?

Either way, the unit works flawlessly, and was a good bargin, so I guess I am the proud new owner of a limited edition “Sandisk Sansa REFURB”.

Microsoft has released Virtual PC 2007 as a free download.

Download Here

Microsoft has officially released SQL Server 2005 SP2.

Changes in SP2

Download Here

It has been a while since my last blog post.

I am not dead, simply very busy as of late.

Microsoft has officially released the first version XNA Game Studio Express.
They have also setup a XNA Creators club which will set you back $50 for a 4 month subscription or $100 a year.

Grab it here: XNA Game Studio Express

Microsoft has released XNA Game Studio Express Beta to the public. Although you cannot yet create retail XBox 360 games with this Beta, developers can begin working with XNA Game Studio Express before the final release this holiday.

This package will allow developers to create games for Windows XP, Vista, and the Xbox360.

Grab it here.

Just wanted to let everyone know why there has been a lack of updates lately.

I got married on August 12, 2006 to Carla Sepulvado. She is a wonderful person, and I have truly never been happier. We then took a week honeymoon to Walt Disney World. Gearing up for the Wedding left me little time to update the blog in the last few weeks. The wedding was wonderful. Around 500 people attended. Carla and Her parents did a wonderful job planning and organizing the wedding details. Like most Grooms, I was more support and suggestions :). I can never thank them enough for the special wedding gave Carla and I. The reception flew by. I can’t wait to see the video/photos, because I know I did not get to greet everyone, and I never even made it to the side of the room with the food.

In other news, on August 7th I started a new Job at New Tech Computer Systems here in Shreveport. Due to time off taken for the wedding/honeymoon, I have only been working around 7 days. So far I am really enjoying it. I have a lot more on my plate at New Tech, so the days have been flying by. This has also led to a slowdown in blog posts. I am not complaining however, being busy is a good thing.

I just thought I would update everyone on what has been going on in my life.

Now back to Work!
Dave