Everyone has their first blog post. It seemed appropriate that mine should document how I set up my own site. I've read a lot of positive comments about a relatively new offering from Telligent called Graffiti CMS and while it's not your typical blogging software, it has the features I need, is written for .NET, and offers lots of potential for customization later on.

Preparing the domain

I already had a domain name registered at GoDaddy, but wasn't excited about using their hosting services. Instead I went with DiscountASP.NET. I've used them in the past and have been very happy with their performance and support. After I purchased a Windows 2008/IIS7 hosting plan at DiscountASP.NET, then updated the DNS entries for the bussinger.org domain to point to the new website. I prefer to keep my DNS servers independent from my web hosting as it makes it easier to change hosts later. I've used the free DNS services from ZoneEdit for years and they've been great! I set up bussinger.org to point to the IP address of my new hosting servers and ZoneEdit's WebForward feature to redirect www.bussinger.org to bussinger.org. This keeps the search engines happy by not have two different domain names for the same site.

Installing Graffiti CMS

After clicking on the "GET IT NOW" link at http://graffiticms.com, I downloaded the free Express Edition of Graffiti. It is necessary to register on the website before you can download the software, but it's a painless process. Following their recommended installation instructions at http://graffiticms.com/support/getting-started/installing-graffiti/, I unzipped the installation file on my local hard disk. I chose to skip running Graffiti locally and just FTP'd the contents of the downloaded "\web" folder to my new hosting account in a folder named "\blog". I didn't want to install Graffiti to the root of my host because I like having the option of installing other software on the server in the future and don't care to try and nest applications inside one another.

Once all of the files were uploaded, I logged into the DiscountASP.net control panel for my domain and marked the "\blog" folder as an application. I wanted the blog to be the main entry point to my site so I decided to redirect any requests to "bussinger.org" to "bussinger.org/blog". Along with the forwarding I'd already established from "www.bussinger.org" to "bussinger.org", that should force everyone to the single main entry point of my blog at "bussinger.org/blog". I used Microsoft's standalone IIS7 Manager program to log into my account and used the URL Rewriter module to redirect "/" to "/blog".

I tested all of the redirections using a nice web service at http://news.stepforth.com/seo-tools/http-header-checker.php, verifying that "www.bussinger.org" and "bussinger.org" both returned proper 301 redirects.

That's It!

When I visited http://bussinger.org, there was my new Graffiti blog! While the official Graffiti installation instructions warn about having to set some security permissions on the server, I found that the default installation has worked fine for me with no such changes. I logged into the system using the default "Admin" username name and a password found in the web.config file in the root of the Graffiti directory, then used the Graffiti Control Panel to tweak the default settings, change the password, and delete the sample data.

Installing Graffiti CMS was really painless and so far I've been quite happy with it. I’m looking forward to getting deeper into it over the coming weeks. The main feature I see that is still missing is a forum module. They've promised it for a 2009 release and hopefully they'll come through on that promise.