Ok conversion complete, seems to be going well thus far.  A few people can still see my blog in their reader, so that bodes well.  Hopefully others will come find it again.  My apologies for being so stupid about that, and the fact that all of my google links are now broken, which sucks because I was in the top few searches on a few items, like Word Interop and various OOP categories.  Oh well...live and learn.

As for the conversion.  First, the SubText setup was damn near painless.  Only ran into a few snags, but they aren't the fault of SubText.

  1. Make sure your site is running ASP.Net 2.0.  My Brinkster site was on 1.1.  Converting that was as simple as a live help request to the Brinkster tech and it was done.  (as an aside, I've been using Brinkster to host this blog and other projects for almost 6 years now.  They constantly get better and better with uptime and support, the tech support is 24X7, and the price is pretty unbeatable.  Check them out if you need hosting.)
  2. If you are on shared hosting, like Brinkster, you will need to comment out the <trust level="Full" originUrl=".*" /> line in <system.web> section of the web.config.  These settings are set at the machine level by those hosting companies and will throw an error if you try to override them.  Comment the line and all is well.

Those were the only two snags I ran into for the SubText setup, and I had the whole thing up and running and ready to go in about 5 total minutes.

Converting my old DasBlog posts was a breeze too.  Following Rob Conery's lead I downloaded dasBlogML, open the two projects, edit program.cs to your backed up local dasBlog folder, and run it.  It will puke if you don't comment out the lines around doing import.xml, but output.xml is what you need.  Pro tip here:  my full BlogML converted dasBlog content was over 30 megs.  SubText will choke and die if you try to import this over the web.  However, reading around I found that it seems SubText won't import the comments and referrers and whatnot anyway, so go through this folder and delete all the date-dayfeedback.xml type files, so all you have is the date.dayentry.xml files.  This took my 30 megs of export down to 1.5.  Much more manageable.  I'm sorry to have lost some of the comments, but i'm not sorry to have lost the bulk of the size, which was comment and referral spam.

After running the import, you need to connect to your database and run a very quick query (thanks Ayende) to get the post order right.  

UPDATE subtext_content SET DateSyndicated = DateAdded

And that will set your post order right.  Don't worry if you refresh your blog and it doesn't seem correct right away.  Takes a few seconds for data changes like that to take effect it seems.

After that, it's done.  You are converted.

A note about why I switched...I have been loyal to DasBlog for 3 years now, and I love it as a blog engine, and it's really great, best of breed IMO, if you don't have SQL.  But I couldn't run trackbacks anymore, and I couldn't get any metrics on my site without looking through the loads of referral spam, and the answers weren't coming fast enough.  Also, having been a DasBlog user for this long, I can tell you that it really came into its own once Scott Hanselman got heavily involved, and with his recent announcement (grats to both Scott and, maybe moreso, Microsoft on this one) I am not comfortable with how fast DasBlog will progress, whereas SubText will continue to have the multi-talented Phil Haack at the helm for the forseeable future, and he and his team have been rocking this engine with nonstop upgrades.  Mostly though, I thought it was time to try something else out.  So far, I'm very happy with the feature set that SubText has, and I've already seen a downtrend in referral spam.

Big thanks to Scott, Omar, and the rest of the DasBlog team for all the work you've done over the years, it's a great engine, and was a pleasure to work with overall.

 

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