When I was going to start this blog, I was looking for a good blog engine to run. I looked at several .NET blog engines and I couldn't find one suitable for a personal blog. Most of them are offering much more functionality than I need for a simple blog. I preferred a simple, elegant blog engine and none of them offered this simplicity and elegance. Even the Persian blog engine I personally wrote which will hopefully be released soon, doesn't bring the simplicity I liked. In fact, it's not their fault. They have to be full featured engines supporting many users, multi-author blogs, user customizable templates and much more. I want to have full control on my blog so free blog providers were out of choice. I decided to write a very light and simple blog engine myself for my personal use. Since I didn't have spare time to do so, I decided to install community server and use it for a while until I write my own engine. I haven't had enough time to do so yet and I'm still going with it. As I remember, community server was started from ASP.NET forums open source project by a then-Microsoft employee named Rob Howard (I remember he was mostly the ASP.NET caching guy) who left MS and started to develop community server. From a simple forum project, it grew to support blogs, gallery and much more for a multi-user environment and now it's really a big project. As a side note, I remember many of the ideas and patterns that are now part of ASP.NET itself started from that forums project (like roles, membership, data provider pattern, etc.).
I hate writing blog posts in a browser. I like Windows Live Writer very much and I really wish there was a similar thing on Mac OS X for free. If I have enough time, after I wrote my light blogging engine, I will write a blogging client for Mac OS X Leopard and possibly iPhone OS 2.0.
By the way, I know this blog looks like crap in Firefox. It has something to do with the theme used. I don't know if it was broken from the start or I broke it. I primarily use Safari on Leopard and IE7 on Vista and it looks OK on them. I agree this is unprofessional but it doesn't worth fixing as I want to rewrite the engine from scratch. I promise I'll support Firefox on my own engine. Until then blame everything on community server guys :)