The change to WordPress from Subtext went without major hitch. This was great considering I was tweaking the design and articles right up to going on holiday (I wouldn’t do this in a professional environment but my blog is a sandpit for such dare-devil risk taking ;-)
Here are my notes on the experience.
I have been planning on moving my blog off my little Windows Shuttle PC at home onto a hosted service for some time and the latest flurry of activity followed by DSL line meltdown was enough to give me the nudge I needed to get the job done.
Rob Conery provided a useful .NET/Subsonic app to make the transition from Subtext about as painless as possible bar the obvious one of going with a PHP based solution when I know .NET is a better technology.
I’ve been trying to get my content out of Subtext and into WordPress – a process that shouldn’t be difficult however Subtext only supports the blog-independent BlogML format and whilst WordPress supports a number of import formats BlogML isn’t one of them. For export WordPress only supports it’s own WordPress WXR format although the BlogML guys have an exporter available.
The first idea was to put together an XSL transform to convert BlogML to WXR.
My favorite .NET blogging system, Subtext, is celebrating it’s first .NET 2.0 compatible release known as Subtext 1.9.
Haack and the team have worked hard on getting it out so here’s a thanks to them.
Getting my blog out of Blogger.com and into Subtext was not as easy as I’d hoped…
BlogML is an XML format designed to encapsulate a blog, it’s posts, comments and categories. Sounds great for transferring between blogs… Alas while SubText and many other engines support it Blogger.com does not.
It’s been long overdue but you can thank Blogger for being down for long enough to force me to move my blog to the same host as my web site.
I’ve been wanting categories, track-backs and finer control for some time. I looked at dasBlog, .Text and CommunityServer and rejected each for one reason or another before settling on Subtext. It is far from perfect but it’s the best .NET blogging engine for me right now – yes I know there are some great PHP blog systems out there but I have an aversion to PHP.