Blog Migration: Moving to WordPress

Okay, so here’s what happened. Kevin Dente twittered about the hosting deal he got a couple of weeks ago at Dreamhost.com, which was much better than what I was paying at GoDaddy. Since my renewal was coming up soon anyway, I thought it was a great opportunity to save some money. So I filled out all the forms, paid my $20, and was quite happy with myself. I quickly realized my mistake, however. The one choice the forms at Dreamhost didn’t offer me was which OS to run on. That’s right, Dreamhost is Linux only, and I was running on BlogEngine.NET. Fail.

It turned out not to be that bad, though. One of the auto-installable applications Dreamhost offers is WordPress, so I just had to figure out how to import my blog entries to WordPress from BlogML, the export format used by BlogEngine.NET. Fortunately, Aaron Lerch had developed a module to do just that. After following his and Nate Irwin’s instructions, all my old posts were imported, albeit with some weird question-mark-looking characters in the posts. I’ve cleaned up a lot of those, but if you look at some of my older posts that I was too lazy to clean up, you’ll see what I’m talking about.

I have to say, after using dasBlog and BlogEngine.NET, the WordPress management interface is like a breath of fresh air. People talk about the codebase being crappy, but the user experience is excellent. Lots of features, a pleasant UI, and stuff just works. I’m quite happy I made the move, even if it was by accident.

Another couple of plusses because of the Dreamhost move: unlimited storage space, ssh access, and Rails. I’ve really been wanting to dig more into Rails lately, and having the opportunity to put stuff out on the intarwebs if I happen to create something cool is great.

Thanks for bearing with me as I transitioned!