New Virtual Home

My virtual home has moved numerous times since it was originally built in 1995 when I was a graduate student at Cornell. It has been hosted by a number of hosting service providers, and has gone through equally numerous renovations. I always kept it simple, flexible, mobile, platform agnostic and fully under my control; and this was why I could easily move and change quickly.  This changed when I started to use a content management system (CMS) - Orchard - to manage my virtual home in July 2011. Firstly, it is not platform agnostic anymore.  It depends on Orchard which is based on Microsfot ASP.Net MVC technology.  It is not fully under my control anymore.  Orchard is an open source project sponsored by Microsoft. Its flexibility has been reduced.  I believe I made a good move. ASP.Net MVC is a technology that I have embraced after observing and evaluating it for a while. It is a very solid and sensible platform. I have created a number of projects using MVC. It is not a platform for laypersons or casual programmers.  It is for experienced programmers who appreciate elegant and solid architectures, and care about productivity and quality.  Orchard still allows me a great control of my virtual home while it manages most of the tedious part of maintaining a website. I am grateful.

I thoroughly enjoyed using Orchard until 2017 when I Orchard became stale, its development and improvement dwindled.  The aging editor that does not allow spell checking is a significant downside.   I started exploring Umbraco in February 2017, and made the final move on in December 2017.