My First Post with Pretzel

Bye Community Server, Hello Pretzel

I stop writing on http://www.aspnetzone.de/blogs/juergengutsch/ and changed the blog software to a more flexible and agile system based on Pretzel. Pretzel is a Jekyll clone written in .NET using a funny API. You need to 'taste' your blog to view your latest changes in your browser locally and you need to 'bake' your Pretzel blog before delivering your changes to the server.

Markdown instead of Markup

Like Jekyll, you need to use Markdown to write your blog posts for Pretzel. So, I also changed the offline editor to MarkdownPad 2. Markdown helps me to focus on content, instead of formatting. E. g. with the old blog system I had to format the code blocks online in the system after publishing, because the Windows Live Writer didn't support the code formats of the system in the right way.

In general, writing offline is one of the most important requirements I have to a blog system. Because I travel a lot with the train and the "Deutsche Bahn" (the German railway company) seems to be pretty incompatible with the internet ;)

Switching to English

I also switched to English, because I used to speak and to write English almost every day. And this is also a way to get more experience in writing and speaking English. Please feel free to send me notes and hints about spelling errors :)

Hopefully this is also fine for the most of the German speaking readers of my blog. Currently I have around 1000 activities per day via the FeedBurner feed and around 400 views per day directly on the articles. If you are not happy about the English posts, please drop me a note. Maybe it is possible to share the contents also in German.

From time to time I will translate the most important blog posts of the old system, to use it in the new system. I will select the specific posts by the number of reads.

This blog ...

... is still is not completely configured and there are some features I need to implement. Especially the Tags are currently disabled, because I need to hack around Pretzel a little bit to create tag overviews. Maybe I will arrange some things around the layout, colors and so on...

A very huge "Thank You" ...

... goes to Marian Gieseler, a colleague of mine at the YooApplications AG who creates the initial design of this blog. I'm pretty happy with this layout and proud to present it to the world :)