It’s been a while since I posted anything, so although this won’t be anything directly related to SharePoint, I figured I would write a brief update about what I’ve been up what’s going on.

  1. The New Blog

Some of you have already noticed, or may be noticing right now, that I’ve switch my blog hosting. I used to be using a free SharePoint Foundation shared hosted site from FPWeb. I’ve since migrated over to an Orchard Blog hosted on Windows Azure. The look and feel isn’t anything spectacular, and I still have plenty of work on want to do and give it a nice look and feel, but for now the basic functionality is here. I am missing a few of my older comments before I made the switch to Disqus. Hopefully I can get those rolled into Disqus down the road. I have piled up quite a few blog posts I want to write and have been holding off for after I migrated.

Why Azure over SharePoint or WordPress? First of all, SharePoint isn’t the ideal host for a public facing blog. While it was cool since everything I do is SharePoint, it just isn’t a great platform for my public blog. While I think it still makes a great, internal corporate blog for sharing information internally among your employees, I just wanted more for a public blog. WordPress would probably be my next choice behind Orchard. The short answer is Orchard is .NET and WordPress is PHP. As I continue to delve into the .NET development world, I figured it would be nice to only have one language to deal with if I want to make my own custom modules and tweaks.

  1. Intelligink

I’ve also recently started working for myself. A while back I start up my own company, Intelligink – www.intelligink.com, doing SharePoint consulting. It’s been a welcome change and a ton of fun, but has definitely added a new level of business to my life. Before you judge me on my web site, it’s still a work in progress. I haven’t broadcasted it too much yet as I’m trying to find time to work on it and still going through the process of exactly what content I want on the site. It’s running on SharePoint 2013 on Office 365, and for a simple site I’ve been pretty pleased. Definitely a lot better than the SharePoint 2010 public site.

I’ve also been heavily utilizing the cloud for my business. I have another blog post started all about that, so hopefully soon I’ll have a more extensive blog post about doing small business in the cloud.

  1. Baby

Last but definitely not least, I’m a proud papa (as of 6 months ago). Last December my wife and I were blessed with our first child a VERY cute little girl. It has been so much fun to watch her grow and discover things over the last 6 months and we have been learning a ton being new parents. As anyone else that is a parent knows, it’s also incredibly busy adding a little one to the family.

So, needless to say, with everything I have going on I just haven’t had time to write some of the posts I would like to. I have a bunch of them queued up though and some of the projects I’m working on will hopefully lead to even more. So, that’s all for now, hopefully you’ll hear from me again sooner rather than later!