So, last night I talked about my work on Migrating the blog to DasBlog. I also mentioned I would post info about how I was going about doing this. Well, this is the post.

First, I have to get my data out of Community Server and into a format that DasBlog can read. there are 3 steps I have done for this:

  1. remove all comment spam from my blog. I get quite a lot, 99.9% of which is not published, but is kept in the DB (I have 1 or 2 false positives). so my first task is clear the DB of these comments. some 15000 where removed in the last couple of hours while trying this
  2. next, I migrate the blog posts, comments and categories/tags to BlogML. This is a XML format for storing your the content of your entire blog in. this allows easy migration from one blog to another. To do so, I used Keyvan Nayyeri’s Community Server 2007 BlogML converter. this allows me to export all my data easily.
  3. Finally, I import the data into DasBlog, which is quite simple too. I uses Tam Tam Weblogs DasBlog BlogML importer for this. This works great.

Now, in between part 2 and 3, there should be a 2a. I have noticed that there are spaces before and after the category names in the BlogML that is generated. this is causing a problem with the import, and when you click a category link, the URL returns a 400 error message. So, I have to preprocess the BlogML before importing into DasBlog.

So far, so good. one or two little tweaks to the URL rewriting section, as I mentioned, and I will hopefully have everything working. I will post more as time goes on.

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