I finally got around to upgrading the NJSQL site from CommunityServer 1.1 to 2.1. Melissa has been (rightfully) after me to clean up the site, and make it look a lot more professional (and a place the New Jersey SQL Server community can call home). I also took the time to reskin the site (much, much easier in CommunityServer 2.1, thanks Telligent!), and move the site to a new hosting provider, ASPNix. Since the site has moved, your DNS may not be updated yet (but by Tuesday, I’d expect that everyone should be pointing to the new server). I must say, I really like the new skin I created. I’ve been fighting CommunityServer for months trying to do my own thing, and it just was taking too much time. Once I went with their table based layout, things moved along. The version of CommunityServer isn’t completely CS 2.1, as I started to clean up their HTML, and started to move to valid XHTML. It isn’t complete (and thru some of the skinning, I think I exposed some more invalid XHTML), but I’m on my way to making it valid XHTML Transitional. Oh, the site now runs under ASP.Net 2.0 and SQL Server 2005 64–bit!
Now that I have NJSQL migrated to the new CommunityServer version, and to a new host, I can take advantage of this, and upgrade all my other sites. I started to create a new skin for this site today, but it will be another couple weeks before I’m ready to move this site. One of the things I’m going to take advantage of is the extra databases offered by ASPNix. Instead of running all my sites on the same database, I’ll run each site on its own database. This way, I am not forced to upgrade all my sites at the same time (which isn’t always easy since I usually have a custom skin for each site. Upgrading a database to a new version is easy, but FTP’ing all the files required for a website can be time consuming, and leave sites down for a lot longer than I’d like to be down.