I finally settled on dasBlog for the new blog engine and this will
be my last post using the older .Text. I spent time with both dasBlog
and Community Server, but in the end dasBlog won out. Some of my
thoughts on the decision were:
- dasBlog is much easier to get up and running quickly.
- Getting Community Server running for a basic, one-person site
seemed more of a hassle than it needs to be… rather than having it be
an option during the install, you have to go through a bunch of config
files and modify the HTTP handlers to redirect requests to the
single-person blog. For someone who just wants to have a basic personal
site and not spend a bunch of time doing web development and/or site
administration, it just seemed too arduous.
- I liked that Community Server included photo galleries, but there
are lots of other options for this, including NGallery (on which the CS
Galleries are built). Plus, it didn’t seem clear to me that the
galleries and the blog could appear to be different sites (e.g. each on
a different subdomain).
- dasBlog seemed to have much better performance (both were tested on
the same machine). While I didn’t dig into the code to see why
this was, my assumption is that CS just has a lot more plumbing
underneath it.
- Surprisingly, I found converting existing .Text posts to
dasBlog to be easier and more straightforward than converting them to
Community Server. The nice thing about dasBlog is that its native
storage is XML files, so re-recreating the archive is pretty easy.
So now I’ve got it up and running on my local machine and need to
start the process of going to the server. So far, it looks like this
involves:
- Getting it up on a temporary subdomain so I can make sure I set remote permissions correctly.
- Transferring all current posts.
- Changing dasBlog to use a FeedBurner feed instead of its local
feed. Also make sure that the old .Text feed URL is redirected with 301
to the FeedBurner feed.
- Archive the old site.
- Move the new site to the old site’s subdomain.
- The only other thing remaining that I see will be to find a way to
correctly redirect URLs for old posts to their new URLs under dasBlog.
Not sure how to do that yet, or even if it can be done in a
straightforward way (e.g. without hand-redirecting each URL). I’m open
to suggestions on this one.
- Figure out dasBlog’s themes and templates so I can do something original (though the canned themes are actually pretty nice).
So… here goes.
