With no disrespect intended for to Radio Userland I made the move to DasBlog this weekend from my old site. I also secured a domain name giving this place a bit more permanance. For those of you considering making such a move I've included some tips and utilities to help you on your way that will allow you to get DasBlog up and runng and make it so you can take your Radio content and comments aloing with you.
Where can get the you get the latest version of Dasblog?
The latest version of DasBlog is on the Dasblog GotDotNet Workspace, this is newer than the one on the Dasblog website.
Any installation issues?
The beauty of DasBlog is that it is all file system based and no SQL server was needed. Installation for me was as simple as dragging and dropping the project files to my web server and setting the correct permissions. I’m running Windows Server 2003 on Webhost4life. In order to DasBlog up and running I had to give NETWORKSERVICE read and write permissions to the /content, /siteconfig and /logs directories. Thanks Omar
What about your Radio content and comments, do you lose them?
Yes, you can bring your previous Weblog entries and the associated comments along with you. Here’s how you can do it:
Importing the Content
- Turn on XML Archiving of posts in Radio Userland. On my machine I saved these to C:\Program Files\Radio UserLand\backups\weblogarchive)
- The XML archiving does not happen until after midnight. To force the archiving to happen immediaitely complete these steps:
· Open the Radio Client Application (Right click on the Radio Tray icon and selet open)
· Hit CTRL + ; to open the Quick Script window
· Type "radio.weblog.archive.update()"
· Hit the Run button
· Watch the status messages on the "About Radio Window". You'll see it write a message for each post it's actively archiving. When it stops, your archive files should all be there.
- Download the DasBlog Radio Importer tool and run pointing it to where Radio Userland has stored the Archived XML from step 1.
DasBlogRadioImport.exe
/from:”C:\Program Files\Radio UserLand\backups\weblogarchive”
/to:”C:\DasBlogContent\” - Once the import is completed, you can copy the c:\dasblogcontent\ files to the DasBlog \Content folder and you'll have all the entries on your site.
Thanks to Sam Gentile and Drew Marsh and Google J for your posts that helped me get through this.
Importing the Comments
Scott Hanselman wrote a utility that will import your Radio Userland comments as well. This cool tool is in the source project for DasBlog so you’ll need to download the source and compile. If you don’t want to do this, I’ve compiled a version and placed a copy here. The format for the tool is:
DasBlogRadioCommentImport.exe
/commentserver:http://radiocomments.userland.com
/userid:<######>
/contentdir:"C:\DasBlogContent"
Notes:
· Make sure you know what your comment server is. Check your HTML, some folks use radiocomments2, etc
· Use your radio user id WITHOUT leading zeros.
· Make sure you use "" quotes when giving the path to your /content directory
· This app has ZERO error handling, so if Radio ever changes their comment HTML, good luck.
· Make sure you've ran the RadioCommentImporter successfully first with the same user id, otherwise the Radio PostIds won't "line up"
Copy the entire C:\DasBlogContent\ folder to the DasBlog /content folder.
How can I save my permalinks?
I’ll be honest, I don’t have this working yet, but thought I’d put this in for completeness, let me know if you’re successful in getting this working. Essentially it’s a custom http handler to watch for referrers from your original Radio Weblog. Details are over on Scott’s Weblog, I’ll try to get this working next weekend and will update this. This assumes that you still have a site over at Userland Software.
That's all, I've got my old content and a shiny new home. Welcome to the show..
