I've finally made the switch away from using DotNetNuke for my blog. DotNetNuke is a great CMS, but the blog module left a lot to be desired and I regretted using it from the start. The number one reason why I switched is I hated posting to my blog using the FreeTextBox control and wanted to find a blogging engine that allowed me to post text and images direct to it from Word 2007 which DasBlog does. Blogging with DNN was a royal pain sometimes and kept me from keeping my blog up to date, so hopefully now I have no excuse to not post regularly. DasBlog also has a lot more extras that I plan to take advantage of in the future. I still plan to run my main site off of DotNetNuke and the original blog in still there as well, but the last posting to it was today informing any readers that may happen to be subscribed to the direct rss feed to update their subscription to my Feedburner address.

I was able to get all my old posts and comments migrated over. It took a few tries, but in the end I only had to update two links manually. I didn't migrate the images over to DasBlog, but left them stored on the original site so as to ease the migration pains. They still show up in line in the blog post, but if you look the link it is actually to the original site. All future images will be posted directly to DasBlog though.

The migration was made easier by a C# application that Scott Hanselman had posted to his blog in 2005. I had to make modifications to it to have it read from DNN and to get it to create files in the proper format for the latest version of DasBlog. I also made some adjustments so that it would properly correct most of my links. You can download the modified C# Application from here. You'll need to update the connection string and the url, but then it should generate the proper xml fields for you.

I still have a few more tweaks to make to the new blog, but things seem to be working well so far. This post was definitely a lot faster to put together and publish.

Be sure to visit all the options under "Configuration" in the Admin Menu Bar above. There are 16 themes to choose from, and you can also create your own.