So I've been wanting to do this for a while after the pain I went through to get Wordpress from one server to another.  Functionality was lost (permlinks) and even some of the character encoding got fugly.

I've been a huge fan of Scott Hanselman's blog and noticed it runs Das Blog and did my research.  I would have figured it would have been SQL Server based, but instead all the data is stored in XML files.  That was the only thing I was seriously worried about however, I had a little mental thought about how much traffic Scott's site actually gets and I no longer cared about the XML files being used for the database.  The nice thing also about this is I can just download everything and put it on another server instead fighting to get the server to play nicely.

So how does one convert blog engine's content to another?  There is this sweet open source tool called BlogML on CodePlex to help aid in converting.  To get your data out of Wordpress, you need the Wordpress BlogML export which was decent, but not perfect for exporting data.  I had one small issue with the data but it was easy to fix.  After that, I used Paul van Brenk's BlogML importer to do this.  BlogML is sweet and a life saver when doing this.

To do paging, that took a bit more effort to figure out, I did a search and found how to do paging in Das Blog on Scott's blog again.  Surprise, surprise since he is a developer on the project.

Nothing is perfect but I want to do this by my self without "cheating".  What implies cheating?  Directly asking Scott to me is cheating since he helps out Coding4Fun and now works for Microsoft and as mentioned above, he is a dev on Das Blog.

There are two things that I have to fix no matter what before I do the conversion is fix the date.  It is too long.  The next problem is how to support people that linked into me before.  Wordpress has ?p=SomeNumber while DasBlog does a GUID or permlink.  I could do a few things but not sure.  This Int to GUID thing is a tad puzzling.  I think I'll have to add something in and just do a switch statement with a map on the default.aspx page.  Until this is fixed, I can't do the conversion.

After this, I need to ditch my gallery for something better.