Dave Bost

If you’re a somewhat frequent visitor to this here blog (Hi, Mom!), you may notice something slightly different. Quite different actually. After a number of hours on my labor day holiday and into the wee-wee hours of the morning, I took the leap to a new blogging engine. Since those early days of November 2003 until Labor Day of 2007, I have been running my blog on top of some form of the .Text blogging engine. The last two years or so, on top of Community Server which incorporated the .Text blogging engine when Scott Watermasysk joined Telligent.

Community Server fared me quite well. However, it was a bit too powerful for my simple use case. Just a blog. One blog. One simple blog. My blog. Community Server is a great platform for running…well..community sites. With Blogs, Forums, Gallery’s, and Downloads. But it was a bit too over bearing for running just one blog.

I’ve been meaning to move to another blog engine for quite some time. My @Someday/Maybe task of “Port Blog to new engine” has been sitting in my Outlook Task bar for longer then I can remember. As it turns out, moving to a new blog engine is hard. The biggest concern I had was to try and minimize the impact on my permalinks on the over 300 blog posts I have over the past 4 years. It’s not a lot compared to most 4 year old blogs, but it’s enough to cause concern. There are, believe it or not, other sites linking to mine other then blog engines. What type of impact would it have? Would anyone care?

That brings up an interesting point. At what point does a blog’s content get to outdated to be of any avail to the reader. I suppose this depends on the content. I know there are quite a few event postings that no longer have any value. Are these entries just clogging up the search engines for the relevant content that people care about? I guess that’s for the search engines to determine and I’m sure their algorithms take that into consideration. Still… is it necessary for me to fret over this old content. Wouldn’t it just be easier to start anew?

In deciding a new blogging engine, I had a few simple criteria that I was trying to follow…

1.) Source code *MUST* be available - I’m a developer. I like learn a thing or two by reading other people’s code. This is a very effective way of keeping that technical saw sharp. I also like to be able to tweak things to suit my needs.

2.) It must have good community support - Tools like Windows Live Writer have to just work with this particular blog engine. Plus, a vibrant community must exist to support any “tweaking” questions that may pop up.

3.) The link impact should be minimal - (see previous paragraph on this quandary)

4.) The technical implementation must be of recent interest - I have no interest in adopting a blog engine written in Cobol for OS/360.

and….

5.) It can’t be written in .NET

Why #5? Because I know .NET. I work with .NET everyday. I talk .NET to my customers and to the community. I like to keep a pulse on what’s going on in the non-.net worlds. I’m currently trying to build my knowledge pool in things like Ruby, Flash/Flex, Cocoa, and PHP. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s difficult to learn a new technology unless you are swimming in that technologies pool. You need to immerse yourself in the tools, the technology and the community. This also gives me an opportunity to analyze where Microsoft is with their tools and technologies compared to it’s closest rivals. That is a large part of my job. I have to convince customers why our tools are better. And if they’re not, I need to communicate that to the product teams, so they can become better.

Therefore, with that criteria on hand, I made the leap over to WordPress. WordPress is a popular blogging engine built on the PHP platform. Being PHP, it still gives me the opportunity to run on top of Internet Information Server (IIS), which this blog just happens to do. There certainly were challenges in doing this migration.

First off, getting the data out of Community Server and into a format that could be easily imported to WordPress was a daunting task and arguably the most important. Thanks to the BlogML project and Aaron Lerch and his WordPress BlogML plug-in, I saved a number of hours and anguish in having to write a data transformation script from the Community Server (SQL Server) database to WordPress (MySQL). (I’d also like to thank Aaron for leading me to the great looking ‘Skittlish’ theme.)

The plug-in wasn’t without it’s hiccups. For some reason the data would never import in one fell swoop. It took like 5 fell swoops. The first import only processed 71 records, then 128 and so on until the 5th try netted me the whole lot of 301 post entries. I’m not going to dwell on that one too long as it’s a one time (ok… five time) shot and now the data is imported. I had several more technical issues mainly with getting WordPress to want to play nice on my hosting provider. Namely the dreaded “Cannot modify header information” error that seems to rear it’s ugly headed when you have an extra carriage return in a PHP script. Huh? I was never able to track this one down, but after several attempts at rebooting the WordPress install, I was up and running.

Everything’s not perfect and I don’t expect it to be. I haven’t succeeded at #3. From from it. The permalinks are completely different than what Community Server gave me, and I’m not smart enough to figure out how to fix it. Not yet anyhow. The search engines and other sites are going to have to deal at this point.

I’m a technologist. I love technology. I have a thirst and passion for learning new things. What better way to learn then by diving head first into a technology you have no real background on. I can tell you this. I’ve learned a ton in the past 2-days getting WordPress up and running. At this point, this is an experiment. An experiment in analyzing the competition and picking up a new skill along the way. Who knows. I may be right back here in a few months detailing how I had to switch back to the .NET platform. Maybe. Maybe not. Let the adventure begin.

What are your thoughts? Where does PHP exceed over ASP.NET? What about ASP.NET over PHP? The tools? The platform? The support? Chime in with your comments. I’d love to hear them. Plus it’d give me an opportunity to make sure the commenting system works. :)