I would like to thank the team over at BlogEngine.io for this super cool custom theme they created just for my blog. I ran across their advertisement in the admin section of my BlogEngine instance and decided to give them a try. Sometimes, adverts such as this one are not necessarily a scam, but misleading. This is not the case with BlogEngine.io and their awesome design team. If you would like to learn more about their special offer on a custom theme (current special price is $35), click here.
I've been using BlogEngine for about a decade now and it's the lightest weight platform that I've used thus far (that uses .NET) and my favorite feature is that it's so basic. Could it have more features? Sure. Do I want it to? Absolutely not. It has just enough to get a formal blog going. About 15 years ago, I started a search for a stable .NET blog engine. There were a couple of them floating around the internet, but one stood out, BlogEngine.net and it had what others did not. It mimicked the simplicity of WordPress back when WordPress wasn't so focused on being the end-all be-all of blogging platforms plus attempting to become a bloated CMS (there are also a ton of .NET based CMS apps out there as well).
The one thing that WordPress had at that time, was ThemeForest. You could go browse thousands of custom themes that suited your needs as well as appease your color palette. To the best of my memory, BlogEngine.net offered 2 themes at the time and one was fairly basic and looked very similar to the standard WordPress theme. The other simulated what you would get if you attempted to use BlogEngine.net as a CMS. DotNetNuke was the king of .NET based CMS applications (but has since been overtaken by many, many others).
Last year, I decided to try BlogEngine.NET again and found that it was now BlogEngine.io but seemed to be the same super speedy blog engine. With only 21 contributors dedicated to the project (according to the GitHub page), it seems like BlogEngine is the little engine that could. There hasn't been an official release in a few years now, but the latest release is extremely lightweight, stable, functional, and fast. So, I ended up installing and attempting to modify the default theme to have a fresh look and feel, but I failed miserably.
Enter the team at BlogEngine.io and their special offer of a custom theme for only $39! I completed the Contact form, and they reached out within 30 minutes (talk about amazing response time)! They asked what my likes and dislikes were and what I would like to see on my blog, then they sent me a few links to some existing themes so I could figure out what I wanted. I approved the final design, and they sent over an invoice and after paying, they informed me that they would have the theme ready in 3 to 5 business days.
Just as they stated, they delivered the theme, and I was able to get it installed and going in less than 10 minutes. So, what does it look like? Well, take a look around, click on some of my blog entries and you'll see. So far, I love it. It's extremely fast and seems to be lightweight as well. There's nothing worse than a fast platform that responds slowly due to a bloated theme or template. That's definitely not the case here. After a few weeks of working with the theme I will post an update on how I feel about it. For now, I couldn't be happier!