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The new blog is live!

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So, my blog looks different now… and it isn’t just a new theme. It’s new blog engine, new web host, new look and feel, new everything!

The back story…

So, I started my blog back in January of 2006. At the time, dasBlog was one of the most prevalent .NET blog engines around on .NET. So, I decided to roll my blog on dasBlog. I chose a recommended web host that had great pricing and also supported ASP.NET. All was great. At the time, I was posting every single thought that came to mind which resulted in a good 20 to 30 posts every month. Slowly, though, over the years, I started to find my blogging groove.

Fast forward to this year. dasBlog doesn’t hold the high place it once had as top .NET blogging engine. Worse still, my web host had seriously gone down the tubes. Lee Holmes posted that his uptime was averaging 60%. If you’re not familiar with uptime percentages, that means that my visitors had a 60% chance for my site to be up.

The last straw for me was seeing a link to the Google cache for my site mentioned on a response to an MSDN forum question because it was down. It was time to move.

The new platform!

The short version: the new blog is running on toto, a Ruby-powered blogging engine. I’m hosting it on Heroku.

The longer version: lately (err, the last couple of years), I’ve become much more interested in learning and writing Ruby code. I had already written two fairly small sites in Ruby (one in Sinatra and one in Rails) and both were hosted on Heroku. The process for those sites had been great. The deployment story was amazing - it was literally git push heroku master. You couldn’t get any better as far as I was concerned.

So, I knew I was interested in moving platforms; however, there were some problems with this. First off, I had to convert my posts. Second, I wanted 301 redirects in place. Third, I needed a theme.

Converting my posts

Thankfully, dasBlog stores its posts in a fairly straightforward way - there is an XML file for each day that can contain one or more posts. On the other hand, toto stores its posts as straight text files formatted as Markdown (if you’ve used StackOverflow, you’ve used Markdown - it’s what they use for their questions and answers).

So, how best to convert? I ended up writing a smallish Ruby script to convert that made use of Nokogiri to parse the XML. The main script turned out to be just under 60 lines. Writing the script turned out to be the best thing I could do, because it let me re-run the conversion process. I could add small tweaks to try to strip out invalid HTML and try out my changes. Since I had everything in source control, I could just run a diff against the converted posts to see if everything still looked good.

Redirecting old URLs

Redirecting my old URLs to the new URL format turned out to be easy for 80% of my posts and time consuming for the rest. I used a Ruby gem called rack-rewrite.

The below code snippet accounted for the easy 80%.

r301 %r{/blog/
  (\d{4})/  # year
  (\d{2})/  # month
  (\d{2})/  # day
  (\w+?)    # slug
  \.aspx$}x, lambda { |match, rack_env|

  helper = RedirectHelper.new

  year, month, day, slug = match[1], match[2], match[3], helper.convert_legacy_slug(match[4])
  "/blog/#{year}/#{month}/#{day}/#{slug}/"
}

I just used a fairly simple regex to parse the old format out and move it over to the new format. I did end up building a RedirectHelper class that contained most of the logic for handling the remaining 20%. Overall, though, it seems to be working well, though I’m sure I probably missed a few posts. If you are browsing around and run into any 404s, feel free to let me know.

The new theme

My starting point for the blog theme was the dorothy toto theme. It provided a nice HTML5 basic structure that I was able to build upon. Since it was already using HTML5, I decided to stick with that. Chances are, the site looks like junk on Internet Explorer 6 and 7. It honestly doesn’t look great on IE 8 even, though the IE 9 beta renders it just fine.

The fun things for me in the conversion were getting to use the Google WebFont API - that’s how the cool fonts are getting loaded in. Everything else was just some minor CSS changes.

I did elect to use Disqus for my comments, because Toto doesn’t provide a commenting solution out of the box. This actually has a couple of ramifications for me. First, I lost all of my old comments. That wasn’t a huge deal, because I never really had a boatload of them. Second, it’s an external service that I’m not in control of. Mostly, this doesn’t bother, but I do think some of my former coworkers back in the Fort Smith area might not be able to comment because I think Disqus is blocked by their firewall. At least it was when I was still working there.

Wrapping this post up

So, anyway, there you go, my new blog. Actually, I’d like your input now. I want to post the code for the blog up on my GitHub account, but I have some questions about the best way to do this. First off, I don’t want my blog content duplicated. It isn’t a huge deal, but I don’t want Google returning search results to the GitHub hosted markdown files over my posts. It probably won’t, because there won’t be returned as the main HTML like it would be when served from my blog, but it is still a concern I’ve got.

And I guess that’s it actually. Try out the comments if you want. Let me know if you like the look or if you notice any broken links or broken functionality.

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