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I was about to download a source code that was uploaded via RapidShare. I'm not a frequent RapidShare user for I just seldom download anything there. So it has been of some time since I have been able to enter the site. I'm pretty quite familiar with CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) actually I was using CAPTCHA on my old blog. I know it's pretty quite helpful from Bot (non-human like spammer) protection. But I guess the CAPTCHA in RapidShare has just crossed some limits. Instead of blocking Bots, they seem to be blocking people with eye-problems or computers with very-high resolutions. Take a look at this and judge for yourself:

This is already an enlarged image. Imagine it on its original size (3/4 of the current size). Imagine looking at those cats and wondering who's sitting down. Actually I've been able to get this right after trying for 5 times! Why can't they just make it like Yahoo type Captchas. I guess their looking for users with superhuman abilities to be able to download from their site.

Can you guess the letters? Just post your answers in the comments area.

April fools has just passed and it seems the pranks hasn't stopped yet. Recently, NY Mets (New York's baseball team) has posted an online voting for the choice of song to be played at the 8th inning, and this sparked a digg-sponsored campaign to vote for the song "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley which is a common prank these days and is termed as "Rickroll". I guess it really is a classic to be able to rickroll a whole city! Hahaha!

Yep, I've finally switched to another blog engine. Why's that? Let me clarify first that my experience in WordPress has been very good, but some things are suitable to others and I think I didn't belong to that "others". Don't get me wrong, WordPress is a very good product but as a .Net developer I was feeling kind of left out when it comes to customizing my blog. You see, WordPress was created on the PHP language, which I'm completely ignorant of, so instead of learning PHP just to customize my blog I went off and find a suitable ".Net" replacement for WordPress. I know that some of you reading this might find it peculiar for me to say that WordPress is not easy to "customize", I know it's pretty quite easy to change the theme, the layout or the plugins without basically learning PHP but what I really mean by customizing is creating you own dynamic pages and maybe your own plugins. And for me, my lack of knowledge in PHP is causing me to just rely on other peoples work. But I guess now is the time to take matters into my own hands.

Thus I welcome you to BlogEngine.net. What is it? Well, just like WordPress its a new Blog Engine created entirely from .Net (obviously a language I'm more comfortable with). I have just stumbled upon it on CodePlex. It's also an OpenSource project from the .Net community which means that just like WordPress, it's absolutely free! Here's an excerpt from their website.

BlogEngine.NET is an open source .NET blogging project that was born out of desire for a better blog platform. A blog platform with less complexity, easy customization, and one that takes advantage of the latest .NET features.

BlogEngine.NET was designed using the current .NET framework and focused on simplicity, ease of extendibility, and innovative features. With BlogEngine.NET, we hope to create the natural blog of choice for all .NET developers world wide.

So lets go to the point, is BlogEngine.net more powerful than WordPress? The answer is simply no. But don't easily get turned off with this new Engine, let me clarify things up first:

• It's a new Blog Engine. Which means the engine is still small and only contains basic blogging features, none of the extra quirks (when I say basic, I mean you can have a full pledged blog site running on this new Engine) .
• Since it's basic and lightweight, it's super-fast!
• If you're a .Net developer then this platform is definitely for you. You can use it as a codebase to learn new programming techniques or simply modify it to create a new web application.

Let me give you some basic functionality of BlogEngine.net:

• Super-Basic blog functionality
  • Add, Edit and Remove Blog Posts, Categories, Tags, Authors (users) and Comments
• Theme Templates (you can download themes from their website)
• Live Writer Integration (you can still write blog entries in your Live Writer and publish it to your blog site)
• RSS Feeds
• Plugins (you can download or develop your own)

As you can see, it basically supports everything a starting blogger needs. And I must remind you that this is an ongoing development, many features are added every release, and I expect this to grow and might be equal to WordPress or possibly surpass it. The thing that really attracted me is its ability to work without being connected to a database. Actually you have 2 choices on how to store your data, first is the use of SQLServer the second (which I currently use) is by using Xml files. I was quite skeptical at first for it might be slower. But after giving it a try I was quite impressed by its performance.

If your interested on BlogEngine.net just visit their website, or you can simply ask me here if you have some questions regarding installation.

http://www.dotnetblogengine.net/