Mono and dasBlog

I’ve been trying on and off to get Mono running on samus.ardvaark.net, with minimal success. The problem is that samus is based on an old RedHat 7.1 installation, running my production web site. As such, it lacks many of the newer dependencies required for a bleeding-edge project like Mono to succeed.

One of the reasons I want to do this is because I want to try and get dasBlog running on my Linux box. I like Geeklog, but I am much more interested in playing with .NET on Linux, and running a blog engine would be an awesome challenge.

Alas, I seem to have been beaten to the punch by Ben Maurer, a hacker for Ximian. While playing with porting various bits to Mono, he discovered that dasBlog does some pretty Windows-specific things in its guts. What a shame. Ben writes a plea to the rest of the world to think about other platforms.

Now, looking back at Microsoft’s past, interoperability with other platforms has always been the least of a developer’s concerns. But with .NET being ostensibly positioned as a cross-platform technology, perhaps its time that some of these developers took off their blinders.

There’s a whole parallel universe out there, and it’s got a lot of cool stuff in it. Don’t ignore it just because it doesn’t have your favorite trademark on it.

Update: Now this is just freakin’ cool.