Largely as a result of iPhone revolution, mobile devices today more wide spread and connected to the web than ever. It is increasingly important for web sites to look good on the small screen to attract mobile users. BlogEngine.Net has mobile theme that looks ok, but we need more and better. I’ve been looking for options and played a little with some of the frameworks available for other platforms. There are some interesting development, and I’m interested in doing more here. As first experiment, I updated my previous iPhone admin add-on and combined it with simple but fully functional mobile theme. It got a list of categories on front page, from where you navigate to the posts. You can also login and publish posts using admin add-on that became part of the theme. Take a look at screen shots, they are pretty self-explanatory. More...

Just finished refreshing my old DarkBlog theme to run under newest BlogEngine 1.5 release. It has been neglected for quiet some time now, I had to add widgets support, nested comments and few tweaks here and there to play nice with new features added to BlogEngine since version 1.3 when this theme was introduces. It looks pretty good with standard “welcome” post, but when tested with my own blog content, some things do not look right. Nothing is wrong with theme though, the problem is content itself - which prompted me to write a note to myself: More...

The dfMarine theme has been updated with sliding widgets. No, I did not become a jQuery^W expert just yet - it is mostly courtesy of Chris Blankenship, I used his AnimatedCollapse extension and it did the job exactly the way I wanted. I did run into problem with jQuery^W using “$” function, it has a conflict with other JS I run on my site where this same thing used a little bit differently. But it was easy enough to ask jQuery switch to using “$j” instead, so that conflict was happily resolved. More...

With Christmas just around the corner I wanted to share something good with BE community to keep the spirit alive :) I hope you’ll like this new theme, it is widgets ready and should work fine with BE 1.4 and up. I think I covered all (or almost all) widgets in CSS, so it should look decent with your site out of the box. One thing I left out is accordion for side bar – all those widgets on the right should slide up and down on title click. Mostly because I want to finally get into jQuery and this is as good reason for me as any to get started, so I’ll upgrade it to accordion when I’ll become proficient enough with this JavaScript library. More...

Just read a great article at coding horror on becoming a good blogger. It says that it takes at least a year to even get noticed and main peace of advice is to keep punching and feel good about it. Well, it sounds… hmmm… encouraging. Thanks God I’m not aiming that high. Anyways, I decided to follow advice and throw a punch – even though my new shiny theme for BlogEngine is not quite ready yet and I was hoping this will be my next subject. Funny how it goes – takes about an hour to convert any CSS template into BlogEngine theme, this is how simple it is and how good ASP.NET overall and BlogEngine in particular implemented skinning. Almost too good to be true – and it isn’t. Dirty little secret is that it takes ten times more to polish it to the dissent “production” state, when it looks good in all major browsers and scales fine for reasonable range of screen resolutions. I’ve heard that there are about ten testers for every developer in Microsoft – totally makes sense! More...