It Was Time for a Change

Thursday, September 1, 2011 11:21 pm Daniel J. Summers

So I made a big one!

After moving to BlogEngine.NET 11 months ago, things started off great. Then, around the first of the year, I started running into some problems. The details are probably more geeky than you really care about; if you do, you can check them out on the tech blog. The biggest problem here was that, after a major upgrade to the runtime environment, the categories weren't being saved.

So, the short version - the blog you're reading is once again running WordPress. The only thing that's a little odd is that BlogEngine doesn't track the user agent from the browser; so, if you left a comment between October 1, 2010 and August 31, 2011, when you look at the comments here, it'll say you were using Google Chrome on Linux. (If that bothers any of the 4 of you, just let me know what OS/browser you used, and I can change it.)

I'd also had the current theme for more than two and a half years, and while I liked the minimalism, I wanted something a bit brighter (but not too much). The theme I'm running now is called “Green Hope” and I was happy to not have to change it around a whole lot; it pretty much worked the way I wanted out of the box. The category and year/month archives that used to be in dropdown menus are now located on the “Archives” page, linked in the green bar just below the heading. “Daily Reads” and “More Sites” are now in the sidebar, and there's a tag cloud just below the Verse of the Day in the upper part of the sidebar.

I have two pretty good-sized drafts in the wings, and ideas for several more. Let's do this!

From WordPress to BlogEngine

Friday, October 1, 2010 8:31 pm Daniel J. Summers

After months of on-again, off-again work in my “spare time” (heh), I have converted this WordPress blog to BlogEngine.NET. I'll have a post up at some point in the future, probably over on my tech blog, that goes over what I think are the technical advantages of this platform.

In the course of the conversion, I spruced up some of the standard-as-of-two-years-ago things on the site.

• The ShareThis area at the bottom of each post now requires no navigation if you want to share content to Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, or via e-mail.
• The theme switcher is gone, as this is the only theme I converted; the others will live fondly in our memory. (Maybe I'll put screenshots on the “About This Blog” page.)
• Comments will now show your Gravatar.
• The “History Repeats Itself” and “Verse of the Day” items will only appear on the front page.

I've implemented redirection on all the old posts to their new URLs, so the internal links should be good; if you click something and get a 404 (“Page Not Found”), let me know. Also, I preserved the directory structure that WordPress used for images, so they should all be there. Finally, all comments have been migrated from the election of our current administration forward; the others will come along, but they are single comments on older posts; it won't hurt them to take a break from the Internet.

One interesting side note - over the course of this conversion, I ended up writing some code that was accepted into the project. I'm not just a user, I'm a contributor! (Update: CodePlex is no more, so the link to my profile has been removed.)