For the past five and a half years, I’ve been running DasBlog. It has served me well over the years and I’m really appreciative of Chris Anderson for giving it a start with BlogX and finally to Clemens, Omar and Scott for moving it along as DasBlog.

For quite some time  I have wanted to make a move to something that had more extensibility, better themes and more of a self service admin. I seriously looked at moving to Wordpress, but wanted a .NET solution. (I just don’t have the time to learn PHP, even that might be a good experience).  I also worried about breaking over 5 years of links by moving to a new solution.

So what to do?

At Mix, I ran into Rob Howard and he sang the praises of his team’s new Graffiti CMS Product. I downloaded a copy before flying home to Mix and shortly into the flight home, got an instance of it running on my laptop. It really was that easy.

Graffiti is simple to setup, has plug-in support and even a scripting language known as chalk that allows you to do some pretty powerful things with your themes. Very nicely done.

To move this blog over from Dasblog to Graffiti, Jayme Davis and Scott Watermasyk of Telligent wrote a Dasblog importer. To preserve my Google juice and links, they created a Graffiti URL rewriting plugin for Dasblog.  That way all my posts 301 redirect to the new Graffiti based URLs. They plan to make these available in a future version of Graffiti, so all will benefit.

Thank you folks at Telligent. This is great.