As you can see I am currently upgrading this blog from the Blogger platform to dasBlog. Most things seem to be working OK and the content is all in tact so I'm happy. The main reason I'm moving away from Blogger is to get more control over the site. There are quite a few changes I will be making here over the next few weeks and having the blog as a real ASP.Net application will make this much easier. I had a few issues getting to this point so if you ever want to make this move read on to save yourself some pain.
64bit dasBlog and IIS7
Both my development machine and my web host are running 64bit IIS7. This causes issues with the default distribution of dasBlog as it relies on a 32bit DLL for it's date picker and does not work in IIS7's new integrated pipeline mode. If you want to know all the details of why this happens Scott Hanselman talks about it in his post on migrating dasBlog to 64bit.
Unfortunately the link Scott provides no longer lists the 64bit version of the DLL however it is included in the source distribution of dasBlog. Look in the lib folder for BasicFrame.WebControls.BasicDatePicker.dll.64bit. I have recompiled dasBlog with the new DLL but have not yet updated my web.config to deal with the new integrated pipeline.
Importing Content From Blogger
My biggest concern about the upgrade was whether the content would survive. As you can see it's gone pretty well but there were a few hiccups. I used the utility provided by Nick Schweitzer to process the content. He provides instructions on getting Blogger to export your blog to a nice XML format and they almost work. Fortunately Nick provides the source to his utility so I was able to make a couple of small tweaks.
The first problem was since Blogger still thinks it's exporting HTML it does not correctly encode for us. A simple string replace to convert these characters to   did the trick. The second problem was that Blogger exported dates in month/day/year format but Nicks code was (correctly) using the culture set on my machine which expected day/month/year format. I added a single line of code to force the culture to en-US and everything worked fine.
Work Left To Do
There is one more thing left to move away from Blogger and that is all my images. Once this done I'll be working through all the site settings, making sure things are set up as I want. I also need to check the RSS feeds are working and that FeedBurner has picked them up.
This is my first post to the new blog and I'm using Windows Live Writer so hopefully everything goes smoothly...
05/09/2008 07:27 PM (UTC -07:00)