The concept is simple.  You need to update your status or send a quick tweet.  You find an interesting link or article you want to post.  No time to catch up on what is going on in the Twitterverse or the 300 tweets you are behind on.  Just need to post an update.  That’s TweetNow!

TweetNow is a simple WPF application designed to allow for posting quick updates to a Twitter account.  It is currently in development and is actively being tested by our staff of testers.  Well, not really staff.  Just me.  And a few friends.

Initial Release Features

- Secure authentication via oAuth
- Multiple account support
- Automatic URL shortening

Future Release Features

- Minimize to system tray
- Hotkey activation
- Post photos to TwitPic

Elouise Katherine arrived Monday, May 4, 2009 at 6:04 PM.  Here are a few pics of the new addition!

I have installed a plugin for my blog that will allow you to view it on your iPhone with no scrolling or scaling required.  Check out the screenshot:

This is a cool feature that makes the blog very easy to read and navigate from your iPhone.

Some time ago I made the switch to using WordPress as my primary blogging engine.  I hosted it myself and had mySQL and PHP for the infrastructure.

WordPress is a tried and true blogging engine so I was very impressed at its stability and performance.  One thing I didn't like, which wasn't really shortfall of the application, was my inability to customize and build my own themes.  The platform was PHP which made it very difficult for me since I really have no background in PHP.  I was "stuck" with off the shelf themes and the inability to customize the engine to my needs.

The other night I came across an open-source app called BlogEngine.net.  This is available for free from CodePlex and is developed by a community of dotnet junkies.  They leverage things like user controls, master pages, and other features of the .NET Framework.  Exactly what I was looking for.

The installation is straight-forward and doesn't require anything special.  The primary storage for blog pages and posts is in an XML file.  You also have the option to use a SQL database.  In my migration I am just using the default XML option.  It works for what I use it for.

There are a lot of extra capabilities built into the product that I don't use.  You can read more about those on their website.

I migrated my blog over to this new engine this last week.  The migration from WordPress was difficult since there are a not a lot of tools to do so.  The default tool does an export from either BlogML or RSS.  With RSS you can only export the post contents; this doesn't get your comments for you.  BlogML is a implementation of RSS that extends the structure to include additional information like comments and categories.

Like I said, I didn't have very good luck in exporting.  I basically was able to track down a WordPress to BlogML plugin for WordPress that replaces the existing RSS export capabilities.  The big problem I experienced was the export failed to pull all of my categories due to a database error and left all of my posts with no category association.  I spent most of the weekend fixing this.  That wasn't much fun.

I also worked on porting the theme I was using in WordPress to the new engine.  That was simpler, but there are still a few quirky things with the new engine when it comes to building out a stylesheet for the theme.

BlogEngine.net has have support for the Metaweblog API so you can use most blogging tools like Windows Live Writer.