Dippin’ My Toe Into the Blogging Waters

Yes, I’m a geek. I tinker with everything. I dipped my toe into blogging during the summer of 2005 by installing Movable Type on my home server (Windows Server 2003 – getting it up and running was a herculean effort worthy of another post at some time). Once I had gotten it going, though, I became afraid that my normal compulsive behavior would kick in and creating new posts would become the sole purpose of my life. In the end, having learned how to get the server running, I bagged the whole project.

Many friends and people that I respect (not a mutually-exclusive group) have been posting frequently and I truly enjoy the added level of communication that blogging provides. So, once again, I thought I would attempt to join the revolution.

Of course, why do anything with a single purpose.  If I’m gonna be blogging, why not with my own server?  Having sorta learned my lesson from the last time, I decided not to mix the oil and water that is Linux and Windows again.  After some investigation, though, I discovered that there are virtually no solutions for a Windows-based blogging server.  The only one with any real substance out there (and it appears to be the one that Microsoft uses – funny that they don’t have their own) – is Telligent System’s Community Server.

Community Server 2.0 just came outta beta, so I downloaded and installed it.  Well, that sounds like a point in time.  Actually, I installed it about a dozen times – it took me that long to get all the protections, directories, IIS virtual directories, etc. all worked out.  it was almost as painful as installing Apache, psp and MySQL on a Windows server.  The server itself looks great and has a huge number of features.  The basic version is free, as well.  It’s this last part that keeps me from complaining too much.  The real problem is that there is just not any substantial documentation.  Trial and error, about a dozen blogs and many Community Server forums are all the help you get.