It took ages, but I’m on dasBlog now. Good riddance to dotText! — I bid it lovingly, though, since it served well for a 1st generation blog engine — Somehow a couple hundred legitimate posts + comments garnered many thousands of comment spams. I expect dasBlog will handle that all better; captchas are a tad annoying but effective, I hear.
That dasBlog is still under active development is a good sign. I find that quality much more important these days. For reference, dotText was last updated almost 2yrs ago (and wasn’t even really released).
So in other news (in the sense that no news is its own news), I haven’t posted much of anything in a couple months, and even then there wasn’t much meat. I plan to start writing/posting with something like BlogJet. (Yes, I actually used dotText’s web-based editor, which was text-only in Firefox — I’m entirely too comfortable with code for my own good). Hopefully this ease will lubricate the writing process.
Regarding the transition: I used two great tools. One was Aaron Junod’s great dotText to dasBlog converter to migrate the content. This would have done the trick many moons ago, except that I didn’t want to orphan all my incoming links (a big no-no to a web dev like me). Fortunately, Scott Hanselman published a Regex to remap URLs from dotText’s format to dasBlog’s (If only I hadn’t fat-fingered that one the first time I tried it way back, it’d actually have worked).
Finally, some outstanding meta-throbs junk:
- Comments were probably lost. Sorry. I noticed spammers were usually changing the subject from the default “re: whatever”, so I killed most of the rest.
- Search is gone for the moment. I’ll add it back in Real Soon Now.
- Images and other locally-hosted junk is probably all broken. I’ll fix that slightly sooner.
- Comments are screwy (dotText saved as HTML. dasBlog doesn’t.)
- Layout is messed in IE6.