I’m Back!

After nearly four years without a blog post to my credit, I am finally taking up the pen cursor and resuming my attempts at regular brain hurls regarding my experiences on the Microsoft Office platform. “Where have you been, Eric?” Well, thanks for asking, Internet peoples! I have been busy! Much of the last two years I’ve been devoted to running and expanding OutlookAppins.com, which has pretty much dominated my professional time. Or you may be saying “You used to blog???” – yup, going back to 2004. I was part of the “first generation” of SharePoint bloggers who were getting their feet wet with SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Windows SharePoint Services 2.0. But I have mostly blogged about Outlook programming.

Otherwise, my previous blog “Eric Legault My Eggo: Outlook, SharePoint and Office development | Not much about waffles” (that’s a reference to those old Eggo waffle commercials, and a guide to pronouncing my last name, but it’s LE-go, not LEG-o as in the colourful bricks) was hosted on OfficeZealot.com, which earlier this year went to the Great Server Farm In The Sky after dying a very long and painful death. I have spent untold hours over the last few weeks manually importing my old posts from snippets of RSS feeds in Outlook and the archives at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Choosing a proper blogging platform was easy (WordPress), but finding a suitable web host was NOT. I started with my current hosting provider WebHost4Life (WAY too slow), switched to WordPress.com (but then decided I didn’t want to pay extra for using a custom domain name if I’m already paying for a web host), then on to MyHosting.com which seemed pretty good. But I just cancelled my new account with them because I realized I already get free hosting (as an MVP) with Windows Azure, which happily has support for WordPress and has been a breeze to work with.

So here I am! If I can blog twice a month for the next year, I’ll be happy. Let’s see how I do!