.

Moving some old posts over

I created a little utility program to help me move the blog entries from my old blog sites / engines to this one. The utility works OK for the most part. So far there have been a few posts that it wouldn't convert properly, but that's OK. I'm probably getting about 90%  moved across successfully. 

The Posted date is a bit problematic: most of the time the utility uploads the correct original post date. But some of the posts are getting stuck with today's date... As a result, all the posts aren't exactly in chronological order.

Ah well, it's not that big a deal. I could debug it, but it's really not that important.

But I've had a blast going back and re-reading some of the long-forgotten posts.

I've recovered all the posts from my very first blog (started July 2003) on blogs.msdn.com. Amazingly that blog still lives over there http://blogs.msdn.com/jblizzard.

The last entry in that blog is a pointer to my (now defunct and non-working) .Text URL.

I've moved all of the dasBlog 2004 entries from dasBlog over here. Still have 2005 and 2006 to do, but I'm going to take a break for about a week.

I still have that .Text database, but I haven't moved those entries over here yet. . . So I have a gap from September 2003 - Feb 2004.

Yes, I could modify my utility to crank through all the entries from all my old blogs automatically, but I don't want to spew all over my current blog in case it get the utility wrong. . . There's no real way to test the thing in a sandbox environment. (Or rather, I don't want to set up a sandbox environment to test it.)

I used VS 2008 to write the little Windows app. It's totally hacked together code... never going to be posted anywhere for anyone to see it.

I used Fiddler to help me figure out the proper XML payload format for the MetaBlog calls. Cool utility.

I wrote the post routine myself instead of downloading one of the MetaBlog DLLs that are available.

Fun stuff.