KevinHarder.com

Today I upgraded KevinHarder.com to CS3 and made a few changes that I've been meaning to do for a while (some longer than others).

My blog URL has changed to kevinharder.com/blog

I know it's heresy in the Google PageRank religion, but I changed my blog url (again). When I first started blogging it was at blogs.kevinharder.com/kevin because I used different subdomains for .Text and nGallery. With the release of Community Server 1.0 I consolidated everything to kevinharder.com, but decided to use a multi-blog setup in case I wanted to create other blogs in the future. Over the past few years I've gotten tired of the redundancy of the kevinharder.com/blogs/kevin url however and wanted something simpler. I barely write enough posts for one blog as it is and I'm never going to have more than one on this site. All old urls will get permanently redirected to the new one so nothing should break.

I'm now using Feed Burner

Using Feed Burner to turbocharge my feed was another thing that's been on my to-do list for a long while. While setting up my account today I was amazed at how many extra add-ons and services they offer now for free. We added support for external syndication services like Feed Burner in Community Server 2.1 which makes using Feed Burner simple. My Feed Burner syndication url (feeds.FeedBurner.com/KevinHarder) gets rendered in my blog sidebar and as an autodiscovery element. Any requests to my former CS RSS or Atom urls get redirected to FeedBurner.

We are trying to make using Feed Burner even easier for CS3. In CS 2.1 we called the feature "external syndication" and didn't provide specific Feed Burner instructions. However just about anyone who uses the feature uses it for Feed Burner, so we decided to go all out and make CS3 and Feed Burner integrate as smoothly as possible. Now that Feed Burner provides a free blog/site statistics service, CS3 can even automatically generate the required javascript on blog pages. I'm now using the new FB stats on my site instead of Google Analytics.

This site is running on CS3!

It's running an early build of Community Server 3.0 (code named Calypso), which is going quite nicely. Scott Watermasysk and Ken Robertson have both already switched their blogs over to CS3 and created new skins using the all new Chameleon theme system. Scott also added a couple of new features to his skin like a very spiffy scrollable post timeline. I absolutely love Ken's chameleon skin, which is based on Arcsin's Bitter Sweet template. It is nicest CS blog skin I have seen so far in my opinion, although I'd like it to be a bit wider. I'm tempted to swipe it for my own site, but I'm going to kick the Chameleon tires and create (or more likely adapt) a new site & blog skin for this site soon. For the time being I just made a few tweaks to the default CS theme.

One other change I want make soon is trying out Ionic's ISAPI Rewrite Filter to remove the .aspx extension from my urls. Scott did this recently using the commercial ISAPI_Rewrite module.