So my fairly short lived experiment with migrating my Blog to SharePoint is over.   As much as I love SharePoint it really isn’t a great platform for public blogging, at least using the out of the box blog template.

There are some major limitations that caused me to switch back:

• Because the solution runs in the sandbox I can’t make any outbound HTTP requests from my custom code.  This means that even if I wanted to write a custom comment handler to use a spam filter like Akismet, I can’t.   The result was that I was getting hundreds of spam comments on my blog. 
• There is no URL rewrite support so all of the URLs on the new blog were simply “Post.aspx?ID=XX”.   This is crap for search engine optimization.
• The comment capability doesn’t allow for anonymous users to specify their name and email address.   This meant that all comments were anonymous.

Overall it was a fun experiment and I learned a lot about sandbox solutions and online hosting.   I think I’ll stick to wordpress at least for now though as I have considerably more flexibility with it.

For historical purposes though I still have the Visual Studio project available that I used to create the sandbox solution here:  http://vallery.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/ValleryBlog.zip