For the past five and a half years, I've been running DasBlog. It has served me well over the years and I'm really appreciative of Chris Anderson for giving it a start with BlogX and finally to Clemens, Omar and Scott for moving it along as DasBlog.

For quite some time  I have wanted to make a move to something that had more extensibility, better themes and more of a self service admin. I seriously looked at moving to Wordpress, but wanted a .NET solution. (I just don't have the time to learn PHP, even that might be a good experience).  I also worried about breaking over 5 years of links by moving to a new solution.

So what to do?

At Mix, I ran into Rob Howard and he sang the praises of his team's new Graffiti CMS Product. I downloaded a copy before flying home to Mix and shortly into the flight home, got an instance of it running on my laptop. It really was that easy.

Graffiti is simple to setup, has plug-in support and even a scripting language known as chalk that allows you to do some pretty powerful things with your themes. Very nicely done.

To move this blog over from Dasblog to Graffiti, Jayme Davis and Scott Watermasyk of Telligent wrote a Dasblog importer. To preserve my Google juice and links, they created a Graffiti URL rewriting plugin for Dasblog.  That way all my posts 301 redirect to the new Graffiti based URLs. They plan to make these available in a future version of Graffiti, so all will benefit.

Thank you folks at Telligent. This is great.

Jon Udell joined our team this past year.  In a short period of time he has played a huge role in help shape the content and approaches we take in creating content for the Evangelism Network. (Better know as the network of communities including Channels 8, 9, 10, Mix Online and TechNet Edge.

Today Jon is launching a new Microsoft-oriented interview series called Perspectives. The show covers a variety of topics including robotics, digital identity, e-science, and social software. For the most part he'll interview innovators at Microsoft and sometimes folks from academia and industry as a whole.

His first interview with Henrik Nielsen and Tandy Trower, explores the Microsoft Robotics initiative. It is worth noting that we're trying a few new things with this series.  First, every episode comes with a written transcript and finally each interview is edited for flow and clarity. I know editing? Scoble would think this is blasphemis. :-)

Great to see Jon's new home out.  Check it out.

Demo of the year for music fans. Not just a demo, going live this week.

Hard Rock Cafe

So we're down here at Mix and what has now become a tradition my team is providing real-time coverage of the event via Channels 9, 10 and Mix Online.

We'll have something for everyone. All the cool demos and deep dives with the partners along with the keynote stream are on Mix Online. On Channel 9, for the hardcore Developers we'll have deep dives with the folks who build the product. Finally on Channel 10, we've got a first look at Internet Explorer 8.

First Look: Internet Explorer 8

Mix is amazing event and has sold out again. Unfortunately, I know not everyone can go so hopefully our online coverage helps you feel plugged in.

For the total Vegas experience though from home, I'll recommend depriving yourself of sleep too.  3-4 hours each night this week should be your maximum.

Follow the Buzz over on Twitter.

This was very fun to see this morning, both Channels 8 and 9 were on the homepage of Microsoft.com

I grabbed a screenshot to capture the moment. :->

Ok, this will hopefully go down as one of those announcements as, "Man, it is about time someone did this!".  Tonight, over on Channel 8 Bill Gates is announcing Microsoft DreamSpark.

With DreamSpark on Channel 8 students can download Visual Studio , Expression and Windows Server. These aren't limited editions or time bombed copies either, its the full meal deal.

Today, DreamSpark we are going live in 10 countries, including Belgium, China, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K. and the U.S.  More countries to come online soon.

Hats off to Joe Wilson, Bruce Curling and many others on the Academic Team at Microsoft for driving this forward. Lots of blood, sweat and tears in a project like this.

It is a great week for students everywhere. 

Postscript: Follow along on TechMeme for more coverage.

We've had a number of new faces join the team in last few months. Max Zuckerman joined us to as Student Content Machine on Channel 8, Dan Fernandez is cranking with Channel 9 and Nic Fillingham is relocating from Singapore to work on Channel 10.

Guess what? 

We have room for one more.  Over on Duncan's team we have an opening.  Come join the Microsoft team that works hard, plays hard and is changing how Microsoft connects with the community through social media.

So what are we looking for?

• Someone who probably fits in the middle (or slightly to the dev side) of your designer vs. developer gradient image…
• Someone who does mostly front end work, but can write .NET code
• Someone who, if asked to write a web page that uses AJAX to call a web service, retrieve JSON, render the results in Silverlight and then make the whole thing interactive using JavaScript would be able to say “no problem”
• Someone who cares about standards and semantic markup.
• Someone who’d like to live in Redmond and work on the next generation of features for Channel 9, Channel 10, Channel 8, VisitMix.com, and TechNet Edge

Is that you? 
Know someone who might be interested? 

If so, send me a tweet, drop me a line on Facebook or send an email and we'll talk more.

We're a small band of brothers and sisters creating cool online experiences, having fun and trying to show the world that Microsoft gets online community. Sort of like a Rebel Alliance living within the death star. :)

Come join us.

Man, what a wild ride the last couple of months have been. As usual we're going full tilt, building out the code that drives the Evangelism Network and the content that keeps people coming back for more. :-) It has been a while since I've blogged about what's going on in my life and there has been plenty going on at work and at home. I figured I'd update you all about work, my life at home is pretty well documented thanks to Flickr and Facebook. Thanks for the nudges folks, let's see if I can stay on the blogging saddle this time. For those not following along at home, at work I lead the team that creates The Evangelism Network. This is made up off five distinct communities for Microsoft, we have 8 for students, 9 for developers, 10 for technology enthusiasts, Mix Online for Web Agencies and TechNet Edge for the IT Professional. This of course all began with our first born child Channel 9 . I can honestly say that when Brynn, Charles, David, Lenn, Sanjay, Vic and I (always have to make sure I give everyone credit ;-)) set out to create Channel 9 , we never dreamt that it would result in a network of social media communities. We were just happy to get the site live. Today millions of customers visit these communities to get the latest news from Microsoft and connect with their peers. It has been an amazing thing to be a part of. One thing that has been equally rewarding (as much so as the early days of Channel 9) is watching the pieces of our code base that drives these sites come together. As I've blogged previously, we started a build out last spring of the Evangelism Network code. We started basically from the ground, using the code we wrote for Channel 10 as the base. The goal being to create something that is simple, localized, scales and is instrumented. We also created a set publishing tools that handle encoding, workflow and uploading to our content delivery network. Last, but not least we wanted a templating system so all sites could look different, as necessary. We really didn't want the sites to be cookie cutters. The great news is, we now have Channels 8, 10, Mix Online and TechNet Edge all running on the same code and our publishing system is alive. You can't imagine how nice it is to have the ability to have bug fixes shared across all these sites. The Evangelism Network grew up pretty organically, so prior to this we actually had four separate versions of the code running. Its a big deal for us as all, to have these now unified as we're a real small team. I consider myself very lucky to have such a great development team behind all of this with Duncan Mackenzie, Erik Porter, David Shadle, Mike Sampson and Grace Francisco all pulling together to make it happen. So what about 9? When is it getting the big update? We're close, so close we can taste it to having 9 moved over as well. Not ready to give the exact date yet, but it will be soon. On the content side, things are going well too. I often tell our team that Rocketboom got away with...

Where the heck have I been? →

We found our Yogi Bear. Dan Fernandez has joined our team and will be a new addition to the Channel 9 team, a new partner in crime for Commander Torre. 

I've known Dan for sometime and have always enjoyed working with him.  One of the first things we did together was a Summer of Express contest on Channel 9 back in 2004. Dan's definitely familiar with what we do (he was the 41st person to register on Channel 9), but will bring plenty of new ideas to the team.

Dan's worked on everything around here it seems from Popfly, Visual Studio Express, C# and was one of our first developer evangelists in the field.

Welcome to the team Dan, more over on 9 and on Dan's blog.

An article in today's Seattle Times, caught both both the eye of myself and my neighbor:

After years of pushing for a mountain-bike "skills park" on the Sammamish Plateau, the Backcountry Bicycle Trails Club got a $150,000 boost from King County to move forward with its plans, county officials announced Wednesday.

The club signed an agreement to work with the county on developing the 120-acre project at Duthie Hill Park, a swath of second-growth conifers and deciduous trees that is underused, county officials say.

This is right behind my house in Duthie Hill Park. Up until a couple of years ago, I used to ride motocross. I gave it up for a couple of reasons 1) many of the great riding places close to home were shut down 2) as I get older, the recovery time when I'd hurt got longer and longer. I also had a brief stint in BMX freestyle too.

The idea of mountain biking has always appealed to me as it gets to those riding roots, is amazing exercise and with this new park, it is right out my back door.

Anyone have a used mountain bike for sale? L-)