A few months back there was a game of blog TAG going on with .Net related weblogs, I'm still bitter no one tagged me! So I'm starting up my own game of tag, this time it's DotNetNuke related tagging! So here it goes, the first in the game, and at the bottom of this post I'll list off 3 other DNN'rs that I'll "tag" and they should blog about their DNN history, and then tag 3 more DNN'rs each. So here goes my DotNetNuke History! I haven't reminisced in a while, I was trying to think of something interesting to blog about tonight, and figured I'd do a little community work! So here it goes, feel free to add your own "Story" when you get tagged, but first you must read mine! Back in the day I was working for a local company here in St. Louis, Swank Motion Pictures, www.swank.com. Don't let the name fool you, it's not that kind of company, it is a great family owned business here in St. Louis. I worked there for almost 3 years, that time around, I had previously worked there, twice. Back in 2002 I was working on Classic ASP apps, nothing too fancy, and without hardly any training whatsoever. In December of 2002 me and my boss took an Atomic.Net class with a training company in town called Quilogy, it was a week long class, and after the first day I was at home playing around with VisualStudio.net in the evenings. One of the first things I did while playing with .Net was to download the IBuySpy portal and store packages. I was actually interested in the two IBS packages because I was also a partner in a small racing business at the time, www.soloperformance.com, and I was interested in setting up a store on this newly learned wonder called .Net. Over the next two months or two I pieced together an application in which I merged the IBS Store and Portal into a single app, most of the work on this app was actually done while I was in San Francisco at VSLive 2003 in February. Sometime in Early January of 2003 I started to hear about this new application, the IBuySpy workshop, but for the life of me I couldn't figure out what it actually was, as I didn't see the original announcement for it in the forums. I saw forum posts referencing something called workshop but wasn't quite clear on what it was. It was probably a month or so before I figured out what the IBSW actually was, and started to try to use it. By Summer of 2003 I was using what was now called DotNetNuke on a few of the websites I ran for hobby, www.solo2.org at the time was one of the most prominent, but there were quite a few others as well. Sometime in the spring of 2003 I started to convert the application I had built using IBS Portal/Store into a DNN application. Considering how new I was to DNN, and actually how new DNN was to everyone, I was one of those guys who developed an application by hacking into the "core" code. Consider that my lesson learned! When I went to upgrade to DNN 2.* later, I learned just how painful it is to go from a hacked version of DNN to a newer version, and I've done my best since then to not hack into the core. By spring of 2004 I was actively posting in the DNN forum on asp.net, and also trying to assist with a project at the time known as ASP.NET Forums 2, I was hoping to help DNN and the Forums project merge together, or at least both use the same membership so that I could use them together to power SOLO2.ORG. In April of 2004 I got an email from my current boss. He saw some of my posts on the ASP.Net forums2 site and noticed I was in St. Louis, a few weeks later I was working for Engage Software in Des Peres, Missouri, www.engagesoftware.net. At the time Engage was starting to use DotNetNuke, and also a little bit of Rainbow portal for various client projects. I quickly came in and squashed all use of Rainbow portal, and we went complete with DotNetNuke for our portal projects. In July of 2004 I was informed I was being considered for membership on the DotNetNuke core team. This was a tremendous honor for ...