*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

Friday before Christmas Ellen and I drove up to Corinth to my Mom's house.  Corinth isn't all that big, about a 1/4 of the size of the town we live in now, so it is sorta like going back in time if you know what I mean.  Life slows down tremendously when I go back home.  The nephews and nieces are about the only thing that keep things interesting.  I do enjoy going back to the area where I grew up.  I know all the back roads and every mile or so reminds me of another story.  Either about friends or college mostly. 

Tonia (my sister) now lives in North Carolina so they were driving in on Friday as well.  According to my sister Amanda, they weren't going to be arriving until about 5:30 PM.  We arrived around 3:30 on Friday and walked into the house to a big surprise!!!!!!!!!!  Apparently there was a race to get back home that I wasn't informed of ;) 

On Saturday night we exchanged gifts at my Mom's house.  Normally we do it on Christmas Eve but because my Grandfather wanted to have the family get together on Christmas Eve for lunch, we moved our's to Saturday night.  It is a good thing we did it early.  As I told my sister Amanda, at least we can now play with the kids instead of having to pack up and leave after opening gifts.  Sonia and Heath were the last ones to arrive even though they live a few miles away and it is a good thing because we could barely keep the kids from ripping into the presents.  They are so funny.  Remind me a lot of someone, hmmm.

Ellen got me an XBOX 360 and between her, my Mom and her Mom I racked up on the games for it:

1. Call For Duty 3
2. Madden 2007
3. Gears of War
4. Outfits
5. Superman Returns
6. Ultimate Alliance
7. Quake 4
8. NBA Live 07

BTW if you play, my gamer tag is Z0RKA (0 is a zero btw).  So far I'm loving the XBOX 360.  Although I can't get it to stream Media Center over wireless yet everything else is working great.  Now I am going to have to buy a new 1080p HDTV to play the games on.   It is killing me to play them on my old Sony Trinitron TV.  It is an endless cycle of one electronic gizmo requires another.  Thank goodness they are suppose to come down in price over the next several months.

Ellen got a FatHead of a Michigan helment, audio cds (about 15 of them), hot chocolate maker, books, clothes, shoes, purses and more. 

My Mom got a bread maker, GPS (from Tonia), toaster, purse and some other stuff.  And Ellen's Mom got one gift this year, but it was a GREAT gift.  She got a new Gateway Intel Core Duo laptop.  Really nice laptop to replace her old computer.  Christmas day we set it up and got her hooked up on AOL for internet service since she only has a phone line.  She may sign up with Comcast later on, she is still getting used to the new laptop.

It was great to see everyone this year.  I tried to take a lot of pictures of everyone and for those I missed I do apologize.  You can view the pictures on http://www.flickr.com/photos/keithelder/sets/72157594453432728/.  

Awhile back I mentioned playing around with SubText and DasBlog, two open source blogging engines written in .Net.  After several weeks of further investigation I decided to migrate to SubText. 

The decision was pretty easy in the end since SubText works with .Net 2.0 and appears to be somewhat architected the way I tend to do stuff.  That coupled with the pretty active email list made the choice easier. There are some features that it doesn't have that I wish it did.  For the features it doesn't have I hope to be able to contribute them to the project.

Before today I had two main blogs:

blog.zorka.com and a .Net blog

Both of these are now combined into one blog on http://keithelder.net/blog/.  It took a lot of hard work to get everything merged into one blog and I thought I would outline the process of how things went since I had to migrate a Wordpress and a Community Server blog to SubText. 

Migrating Wordpress to SubText

Wordpress is written in PHP and I have been using it for a long time on my original blog at zorka.com.  My information went all the way back to 2000 before blogging was even blogging so needless to say I didn't want to loose it.  I had a couple of options that I could go with when I ported the data:

1. Write some custom PHP code to get the data into a format I could import.
2. BlogML export.  Wordpress doesn't support BlogML at this time so even though I investigated it, I couldn't find anything. 
3. Export the data from PHPMyAdmin (mysql database web interface) in some format and then process it into SubText.
4. Write an SSIS package.

In the end I chose option 3 and 4.  PHPMyAdmin allows you to export data in CSV, XML, Excel etc.  The one that worked the best for me was the Excel format since SSIS has a built in Excel reader.  Instead of writing custom code in .Net, I decided to take this opportunity to leverage SSIS (SQL Sever Integration Services) to assist with the import.  After creating a new solution I was able to quickly throw together a Data Flow to take the Excel file which held the blog posts and import it into the SubText database.  There were some conversions that needed to be done since SubText has some columns that are required in order to work but in the end nothing that was terribly hard.  Looking at some sample articles SubText required 4 additional columns that Wordpress didn't provide so I derived those from global variables after data was converted and verified that I had written the blog post.

Once I got the initial posts imported I had a little bit of clean up to do on some posts because of the way PHP handles characters as well as escapes a lot of quotes.  In the end it was easier to search and replace the exported file and replace the characters before the SSIS package ran. 

Migrating Community Server to SubText

 Once Wordpress data was imported I had to get the Community Server data imported.  Once again I had four choices and initially tried doing a BlogML export.  While Community Server supports BlogML imports and exports via a plugin, the plugin bombed while exporting data for me.  I think there was some malformed XML or something in one of my posts that caused it to fail.  I couldn't really tell so I stopped going down the BlogML route and wrote another SSIS package to extract the data. 

BlogML Makes It Easier

For those that aren't familiar, BlogML is a new format that allows you to easily migrate your blog data from one to another.  Several of the major blogs support it that are written in .Net and a lot of us are hoping it catches on in other platforms.  With all the data from both blogs loaded into the database locally, I copied the SubText files to the server and did a new installation.  Once SubText was running on the server I did an export into BlogML and then imported it into the server.  Within minutes all of my blog data was on the server.  BlogML is really nice when it works and I hope more blog engines start to adopt the format.  It saved me from having to backup and restore the database onto the server, definitely much easier.

In the end of the conversion I lost my comments from both blogs.  I just didn't feel like saving them for whatever reason.  Hopefully those of you that commented will re-comment.  The conversion is complete and I updated my RSS feed to point to FeedBurner as well.  If nothing else, if I have to move things around again, you won't have to change your readers. 

I hope you enjoy everything being in one place finally.  I know I do.