dasBlog sucks! I've come to discover this over the last couple of days. Oh sure, it draws you in easily enough with its promises of "fun to install" and "easy to extend". But make no mistake, dasBlog is evil. EEEEEEEVILLLLLL.

Here's how they get you. You install the product in less time than it takes to write up a mildly entertaining blog entry. Configure it in a little more time (because you're still slightly stunned at how easy it was to install). And bam! Your blog is up and you're sitting there in a daze wondering what to do during the rest of the time you were expecting to be swearing up and down that there should be more documentation.

So you think, "so, that happened" then decide "may as well take a look at the code and see what she's got." Again, you open up the project with no errors and start looking through code that you can not only follow, but that you could have written.

This is the point where a strong man would close the solution and go watch a movie, read a book, invent a Flo-Bee, whatever. If you're weak, like me, you'll start wondering. Little things at first, like "y'know, I bet I could make a theme" thus violating your prime directive: "web page design is best left to creatures that know you don't wear argyle socks with shorts."

But you make your way through and discover what everyone is complaining about with browsers and CSS. But no matter. It's a "learning experience" which is a name people give to their mistakes. By the time you get around to, "I bet I could install some Atlas controls into this thing," you may as well transfer your retirement fund into your burgeoning psychiatric bill.

For you see, it's precisely because dasBlog is easy to install and easy to extend that traps you. It starts you down a path meant for non-compulsive people who know when to "let it go, man". People who will walk away when they can't get a CollapsiblePanelExtender to work no matter how many times their wives tell them, "will you turn that &*$%# thing off and go to sleep already?". People who do not weep in frustration when a "fix" for Firefox is a "break" for IE.

Had the product been unwieldy and unintuitive, as I had hoped, I would have spent a week or so fighting with it to get installed, then banished it to the dark corners of my memory, never to be touched again until the "next big thing" came along.

But nooooo! Scott Hanselman has to make it nigh impossible to resist the urge to start tinkering and wedging in untested technology. Stuff that, if I had done it on my own little web project and couldn't get it working, I would say, as I often do, "programming's too hard" and delete all traces from my hard-drive.

But in dasBlog, there's always this nagging feeling like, "I might actually be able to release something useful with this". So you double your efforts not wanting to disappoint your three or four readers until you're left with what now powers The Coding Hillbilly. I've named her FrankenBlog.

For the record, the CollapsiblePanelExtender will not work without a DOCTYPE declaration which opens up a can of CSS worms I'd prefer to block out.