After more than two months of e-mailing – then vacation and then some more e-mailing – it finally happened. The open source BlogEngine.NET project made it to the official ASP.NET website where it has been accepted as a starter kit. It is also featured on the Community Projects section of the site along with other cool projects.

This is indeed a great day for the BlogEngine.NET team and community and I feel damn proud about it too. What it means is that BlogEngine.NET made it to the mainstream ASP.NET audience and that the community now will grow much faster then expected, which is a good thing of course.

Hopefully it means that even more people will create and share their themes, extensions and controls along with tips, tricks and how-to’s. This will strengthen the product and the community even further. I cross my fingers.

Yesterday, Simone wrote a post about the YSlow Firebug extension where he listed different websites and their YSlow performance ranking. My website was one of the sites he compared and as you can see from his list, it didn’t do all that well with a score of 52. It was actually 56, but I think he made a typo. There was only one thing to do and that was to do everything I could to improve my rank. I’m competitive, what can I say?

It really doesn’t make sense to be competitive with this, because YSlow suggest things that makes no sense for a regular website or blog, but I’ve managed to ignore common sense before so this was up my ally.

The work

Some of the things YSlow mentioned was the missing expire header on the WebResource.axd. I quickly wrote that into my HTTP compression module. Also, the CSS file needed HTTP compression, so I added that to the CSS HttpHandler I use. Then I improved the use of the ETag header as well along with optimizing the number of HTTP requests on the page.

After fiddling for a long time with compressing the WebResource.axd handler I gave up. I’m not sure it can be done in a simple manor, but if I find out it will be the first thing I’ll add as well.

The reward

The result was pleasant. I went from a ranking of 56 to 71. That’s an improvement of 27%. If you look at Simone’s list you’ll see that I now rank second just after Google and thereby beating the rest of the sites on the list. Ohh, I love the smell of victory in the morning (it is actually 11pm but it doesn’t have the same ring to it).

The challenge

Since Simone also wrote a list of the various blog platforms and their ranking, in which BlogEngine.NET was near the bottom based on my site alone, I have decided to take off my gloves and challenge him to a friendly duel. Since the fixes I did will benefit all BlogEngine.NET users, I want the good name of BlogEngine.NET redeemed. It is actually now at the very top of his list beating the competition (if one such exists in the open source world?).

So, Simone, consider you challenged to beat my YSlow ranking of 71. I used 4 hours on my fixes, including hitting a dead end on WebResource.axd compression, so I think it is fair that you cannot use more time than that either - a gentleman agreement. And remember that you also represent SubText since you are on the dev team. Good luck.

UPDATE: Simone just accepted my challenge. Check out the comments.