Some History

This website, and the blog, has been online since 2002 !
Yes, 21 years that the domain was registered, and the website and the blog with it available online.
The very first version of it was built on some home-made CMS, that was barely working and really difficult to maintain.
Despite of this, at that time, it was an excellent occasion to work with a .NET-based web application, but it rapidly became unmanageable.
At that time, the web site was hosted in Switzerland, at a company named Maximedia – which became Green after many years.
Still keeping a .NET and SQL shared hosting, I decided to move to a .NET WCM (web content management) from the opensource community, named N2CMS, and DasBlog for the blog engine. The idea was to keep the possibility to customize both platforms, but…..it never happened. Additionally, both projects stopped and didn’t get any updates after just few years.

Then, around 2008, everything got moved to Brinkster, until couple of weeks ago.
Looking back at the needs, I realized that having .NET applications and therefore a Windows hosting wasn’t worth the lack of simplicity for the content management.
Here came the decision to move to WordPress, and an integrated hosting, back in Switzerland, with Infomaniak.

Then, around 2008, everything got moved to Brinkster, until couple of weeks ago.
Looking back at the needs, I realized that having .NET applications and therefore a Windows hosting wasn’t worth the lack of simplicity for the content management.
Here came the decision to move to WordPress, and an integrated hosting, back in Switzerland, with Infomaniak.

The migration

This is when the question of the migration came in.
Not really for the website, where only few pages existed and needed a complete revamp, but for the blog for which I wanted to keep the content.
So, how to migrate the DasBlog content into WordPress ?

Images migration

For the images, it was pretty easy, as DasBlog is storing them in a /content/binary folder within the blog directory.
The only subtilty is that in WordPress, images have a path containing the year and month of the image upload.
It is important, because in all blog posts, the references to the images needed to be updated with not only the new URL, but with the right year and month, and modifying the blog post’s references had to be done with this in mind.
Therefore, a complete download of the images from the source and then an upload in WordPress made the trick easily.
That was the easy part

Blog posts migration

One big decision was to NOT migrate the posts’ comments. They were really few, and it wasn’t worth the effort to migrate them.
And, the good thing is that DasBlog is storing its content in XML files, with their names composed of the day of the post, with a .dayentry.xml extension. This meant that a download to a local drive was enough to export all the blog content, more than 200 files.
Because of the change of the URL structure of the images between DasBlog and WordPress it was necessary to update all the URI references to the pictures
Then came the question of the import into the WordPress engine.
And, at that time, the final target engine and hoster was not yet available, which was an additional challenge.
Therefore, I opted for opening an account to wordpress.com, and, from what I understood, the APIs of this engine is different from a privately hosted wordpress engine.
It was decided to use a PowerShell script to extract the content of each individual dayentry XML files, create the headers, body, and content-type before caling the /posts/new API at wordpress.com.
As we say, it would have been too beautiful to be true…..indeed.
The blog posts where written from different tools : the DasBlog editor directly, the LiveWriter tool, and last but not least, Word. And, the consequences of using several authoring software is that the encoding characters might be different, making the XML files not directly digestible by the wordpress.com API. Fortunately, using an additional line of script, it was easily possible to convert the encoding and import all the blog posts into wordpress.com
The very last step was to export them from wordpress.com and then to use the wordpress engine import tool, which worked like a charm.

Future of the blog – Closing Words

Now that the site and the blog has a new home, it is time to give few words about their futures.
I decided to now focus on cloud technologies, with some preferences to the Microsoft products and services of course, and, based on the experience I gained along the years, to share public speaking experiences and presentation makings.
This means that the blog will go in the direction of providing content on how to improve public speaking skills, how to create impactful presentation, and, in summary, produce a better presence on stage. The same for cloud technologies, where the idea is to share the trends, provide some technology watch and similar content.
So, in short, hopefully, better targeted and regular content to expect on this blog.