Yesterday I decided to move the site to a .NET hosting provider and get setup with a current blogging and content management platform.  After doing some plan comparisons I decided on GoDaddy. The Deluxe plan is only $6.99/month for a month-month deal (can cancel at any time) with no setup fee and includes .NET 2.0/3.5, IIS6, and 2 SQL Server 2005 databases. You can also connect to the SQL Server databases with SQL Management Studio Express running from your desktop and stored procedures etc. are supported.

Since I am going to continue to use Yahoo for the domain's email, I updated the Yahoo Premium Services DNS to point to the shared server IP address for the site running at GoDaddy. The GoDaddy account setup does not require that it owns the domain registration or DNS record - something to keep in mind if you want to try it out and not have to switch your DNS and email around. If I still like GoDaddy in a few months I may move email at that time (they provide 500 MB disk with webmail and spam filtering and more email addresses then I would ever need).

Next I installed dasBlog using the GoDaddy Application Installer. I was impressed that it completed the install including all filesystem and IIS configurations with no errors. Nice! If you haven't heard about dasBlog yet, it's worth checking out. It's an ASP.NET/C# blogging system. I decided to use it because it's written in ASP.NET/C# so I can tweak code as needed and also because Scott Hanselman works on the project and has used it to do some very cool things with his personal site.

Next I pulled down all the dasBlog files locally so I would have a mirror of the site to work against as I started to update files. Be sure you use an external ftp client when moving files up and down to GoDaddy, the Java ftp client they have runs in the browser and tends to crash on long-running jobs (they even tell you this on their site, so kudos to them for that).

Finally I spent a few hours today learning the config files and themes that ship with dasBlog. I started with the calmBlue theme and created my own and that's the theme in use on the site now. The theme is already setup to scale horizontally depending on the browser width. Here's the new theme directory:

The theme files are really easy to work with, they are basically just html fragments combined with scriptlet calls to macros. I removed some of the sections in homeTemplate.blogtemplate and tweaked fonts and other CSS styles in base.css to try and get it to have a clean somewhat-SharePoint-like look.