Like Tim, I’ve been using S3 to host my images for the blog, and I wholeheartedly agree with him – the workflow for writing a post sucked big time. This plug-in had been on my //TODO list for a long while now. Somehow I mentioned that fact to Tim on Twitter and he sent me a link to a screenshot of his initial version. My response? Sign me up!

He uploaded his source to CodePlex and I immediately started implementing the remaining features. The result is the 0.9 beta release of the S3 Browser Windows Live Writer plug-in. Give it a download and try it out! Please submit any feature ideas or bugs on the codeplex site, or you can leave a comment here as well.

I started writing this blog as a way to document my “journey” through software development. Intended partly as a reminder to myself and partly as a source of hopefully helpful information to others, I’m pleased overall with how it’s gone.

But I’ve run across an interesting benefit I never thought I’d encounter. Occasionally, as I research and write posts, often based on what I’m interacting with at work, I find that a post doesn’t “feel right”. It can be overly difficult to explain, or not fit with much that I see on the internet already. I’m tempted to think I’m “innovative”, but the reality is worse: whatever the topic is, I’m typically doing it wrong.

So how is that a benefit? One of the themes from the movie Meet the Robinsons is that failure can be a good thing – if you learn from your mistakes. And believe me, I learn from my mistakes (I have to, I make too many of them to keep making the same ones twice).

I stayed up tonight until 3 AM (not unusual for me, unfortunately) doing some research and writing a post about localizing windows forms. And at nearly the end of it all, I realized that the real problem wasn’t what I thought it was, it was just a symptom. The real problem was more of an application architecture issue. But I never would’ve realized that if I hadn’t sat down and put my thoughts on “paper”, letting larger concepts soak in and speak to my problem as I mulled it over and explained it to someone else (You).

So – if you don’t blog, start! You never know what benefit it’s going to bring. At least exercise your brain by writing down the things you’re working through, even if you never “publish” it. But we’ll all be worse off if you keep it to yourself.

As for my post-gone-bad, I’m going to continue with my thoughts, as they might be applicable in some way to somebody, but I’m going to finish with a description of why my solution shouldn’t be necessary in a solid application architecture.

I spent the last few days trying to decide how this was going to work. I want to post at weblogs.asp.net, I mean I’m just one path away from the likes of ScottGu, Roy Osherove, and Eilon Lipton. Not that it makes my blog content any better, but maybe I can improve by osmosis? However I don’t want anything to change about http://www.aaronlerch.com/blog/ – that feeds my ego too much to abandon. (Kidding)

I considered orphaning aaronlerch.com and “starting fresh” at weblogs.asp.net – another great thing about using a service like FeedBurner is that it makes moving my feed around seamless, regardless of whether a new host supports 301 redirects or not. If for some reason weblogs.asp.net “went away” (or something), I could resume posting at aaronlerch.com without any trouble, just a lot of lost content.

What I finally settled on will work the best, I think. I’m going to cross-post between the two blogs. Cross posting–where a post to one blog is automatically posted on another blog via the MetaWeblog API (XML-RPC)–actually offers a complete answer. I want all my content to be available on aaronlerch.com, but I want some of my content to be available on weblogs.asp.net (my best stuff, and technical only).

Here’s where Windows Live Writer makes this very easy on me. I simply select the destination blog in a drop-down and my editor updates in real time, persisting all my content. Way to go WLW team.

I debated having a single RSS feed – pointing to aaronlerch.com, but in the end decided against it. If people are interested in my weblogs.asp.net blog (which, again, will be a subset of aaronlerch.com) they shouldn’t have to suffer through posts like this in the RSS feed. This makes things a little more fragmented than I’d prefer, but I’ll get over it.

What does this mean for you? Nothing! Same great content, same funny style (*cough*). Thanks for listening!

But I digress. I really wanted to talk about one of my favorite FeedBurner features: the “FeedCount” badge.

(Yes, my stats are shameful compared to Scott’s and Jeff’s, respectively – but so is my blog!)

I find it really interesting to see how many people subscribe to a particular blog. In fact, I have to admit that if I stumble across a new blog with a FeedCount badge indicating 500+ readers (1000+ is better), I’m much more likely to subscribe than if it has say 13 readers, or even 100 or 200. I will at least subscribe for a while, reasoning that “a thousand people can’t be wrong”. This just in: you better believe 1000 people can be wrong.

Mike Hall and I were jokingly-yet-seriously wondering a while back what would happen if we displayed, say, Atwood’s FeedCount badge on our blogs with a link to our RSS feeds? Of course we’d never do that, but I seriously think it would have an impact on the number of people that say “huh, this guy must be on to somethin’ — *subscribed*” based purely on the perceived popularity of the blog. There’s really nothing to stop anybody from doing right now, except turning off the FeedCount feature altogether in your FeedBurner settings.

When I come across a blog that has a FeedBurner RSS URL but no FeedCount, my curiosity is instantly piqued. So that drove me to create a special page for all the curious folk out there: “How many people subscribe?“

But you don’t even need to visit the page! Just enter a feed in the Web 2.0-ish text box below, or you can enter a link from a feedburner feed item, click “Get It”, and the subscriber count will be displayed–if the feed author has enabled the FeedCount feature. Give it a try!

I found myself wanting to add a “kick it” counter on some of my posts to enable people to easily kick them (via their blog reader, for example), but not on every post. I mean, who wants to kick a post about contacting me? Not even I do!

Here would be the process with what I’ve currently got:

1. Write a kick-worthy post.
2. Publish the post.
3. Get the permalink for the post in question.
4. Submit the post on DotNetKicks.com, and copy the HTML for the “kick it” counter.
5. Add the HTML to my just-posted post, and re-publish the updated version.

Way too manual. So after a little research and a little coding today, here’s my new process:

1. Write a kick-worthy post.
2. Click from Windows Live Writer.
3. Publish.

The Problem

It’s simple, really: adding the “kick it” counter requires knowing the permalink of a particular post. That prevents me from inserting it for real at creation time, because the permalink isn’t known until the post is published. I could just add the “kick it” code to my wordpress template, but as I originally mentioned, I don’t want it on every post – just some. (Yes, I realize I’m overcomplicating things – it’s my blog though. )

The Solution

Unfortunately any solution, including mine, will require some cooperation between Windows Live Writer and the blogging platform. Mine includes a Windows Live Writer plugin and a Wordpress plugin. The Windows Live Writer plugin adds a placeholder (“<!–dotnetkickit–>”) to the post, and the Wordpress plugin transforms the placeholder into the “kick it” image/link HTML at render time.

Windows Live Writer Plugin

The Windows Live Writer plugin adds an “Insert Kick It Counter…” link in the list of “insertable items.

Click it and, like any other inserted item, a default “kick it” image is added.

This image is static, and is just for layout purposes only – Windows Live Writer allows plugins to insert different “editor” versus “published” HTML. When editing, I insert a static image so you can get the look-and-feel, and when published, only the “<!–dotnetkickit–>” placeholder gets inserted. Pretty nice on the part of Windows Live Writer to expose that functionality.

When you select the image, you’ll see the “Kick It Counter” properties on the right, of which there are none:

That’s really all there is to the plugin, it’s pretty basic. It doesn’t (currently) allow you to change any of the colors, but that’s something you could manually update in the Wordpress plugin itself, if you want.

To install the plugin, download and run the MSI available on my garage sale code page listed under “DotNetKicks Windows Live Writer Plugin”.

Wordpress Plugin

The Wordpress plugin is beyond simple, partly thanks to the extensibility support the Wordpress developers have built in. The plugin adds a filter that modifies the post content before it gets displayed in the browser. Note that I don’t actually modify the stored post content itself – I want to be able to turn this off and have the “kick it” counters go away.

To install, download and unzip the dotnetkicks.php file from my garage sale code page (listed under “DotNetKicks Wordpress Plugin”). Just upload it to your wp-content\plugins subfolder, and activate it from your admin page:

After activating, you’ll see the “kick it” image on the appropriate posts.

If anybody wants to create plugins or whatever for other blogging platforms that will interpret this placeholder, post a comment here with a link to your implementation!

Finally

The moment we’ve all been waiting for – I’m going to make use of the barely useful tools I created! Feel free to kick this post.

So I struggled with the decision from the start, but went ahead anyway.

But today I slapped my forehead and remembered that I don’t need ads. My hosting fees are extremely affordable and I don’t even come close to my bandwidth limit. So until I need ads, I won’t use them. And when the time comes that I need them (yes, I’m foolishly optimistic, sue me) I will first seek out “sponsors” that really are relevant to software development.

Until then, sayonara ads.

If you read Scott’s blog via Google Reader, like I do, you’ll notice his feed is broken. In his recent Hanselminutes podcast he talks about his list, and how it broke Feedburner last year due to the size of his feed. Apparently Feedburner handles it now (you can see that his feed is up to date if you view the raw feed) but no matter what you do, Google Reader won’t show any updates to it. So check it out on his site.

With me having nothing but good things to say, you’re probably wondering why I’m asking if he’s Jumped the Shark? I’ll tell you why: somehow this year I ended up on his list. (More specifically, my garage sale code page.) Now, I have nothing but respect for Mr. Hanselman, but when I saw my name on the list I had to step back and seriously question his sanity… and the only thing I can come up with is that he’s losing his mind. Did you know he recently just up and quit his job? Yep, it’s true! Does a sane person quit a job they enjoy? No, they don’t. He’s also “taking a month off” between jobs… can you say “mental institution” or “rehab”? I can!

I rest my case.

Okay, I’m obviously joking, I actually consider it quite an honor to be on that list. Cheers, Scott, keep up the great work!

That’s been my spare-time-life on and off over the past few weeks, and now you all get to benefit from my pain. Here are the requirements I had to move to a new blogging platform:

1. Self hosted – while not a hard-and-fast requirement, I really want something I can tweak if necessary. And it can’t be ASP.NET-based, as much as I wanted it to, because I’m not going to pay for ASP.NET hosting. As a developer I also get warm fuzzies about being in 100% absolute control. (Okay, really, as a human being I get warm fuzzies about being in 100% absolute control…)
2. Old permalinks need to 301 redirect to new permalinks – I don’t have a lot of subscribers (but I love you all, so very much) and get a very modest number of hits every day. I really want/need those old links to point to the new ones. It needed to be seamless.
3. Full, or nearly-full, import – I wanted to bring as much information as possible from my Blogger blog to my new blog platform. That means no “import from RSS” features for me, I wanted comments to come over, etc.
4. Well used/tested, and feature rich – I wanted a blog engine that’s been proven. I don’t want to be overwhelmed with spam, or anything else. Along those lines, if a platform is going to be mature, it should have plenty of features. I want to be able to do things like moderate comments (if I ever feel like it), write an occasional article instead of a blog post, etc.

Given those requirements, I decided to switch to Wordpress, and here’s how I did it. (Spoiler: it took longer than I thought it would, required some custom development, and worked out okay in the end.)

I would divide my tasks into three components: exporting from Blogger, importing to Wordpress, and “general configuration” (permalink redirects, etc.)

Export from Blogger

I’ve actually already posted on this here. I decided on BlogML as my “offline” format for my blog, and wrote a PowerShell script to export from Blogger and output the BlogML format. So step one, export to BlogML using my script.

Figure 1. Exporting from Blogger to a local BlogML file.

Import to Wordpress

Update: Rob Walling from softwarebyrob.com has updated the import module to work with Wordpress 2.3 – get the updated version from my tools page. Thanks Rob!

This took the most work. The first thing I had to do was write a Wordpress import module for BlogML, since none existed. You can download the import module here. IMPORTANT NOTE: This requires the Php.XPath library available from SourceForge. Go there and download v3.5, making sure to upload it to the same directory as “blogml.php” (typically something like “/wp-admin/import/”). It is a single .php file. You’ll need to do this at least until I figure out how licensing works between BlogML and Php.XPath–once I get that figured out I’ll be adding this import module to the BlogML CodePlex project.

My steps were as follows:

1. Back up my Blogger files (on my FTP server) to my local hard drive.
2. Log into my Wordpress install and update the URL to be “http://www.aaronlerch.com/blog” (instead of the intermediate location of “http://www.aaronlerch.com/wp”). Note that as soon as I saved this setting, it tried to redirect me to a location that doesn’t exist yet. It’ll fail, that’s okay.
3. Rename the “/blog” directory with my Blogger files to something else, and rename my intermediate Wordpress directory “/wp” to “/blog”.
4. Change the encoding in my BlogML output file. This sucks, but the XML class I used (Php.XPath) requires the XML to be in UTF-8 format. My Blogger->BlogML export script generates it using the .NET APIs, which uses UTF-16 (Unicode) encoding by default. Instead of spending a lot of time tweaking the BlogML output-which wouldn’t benefit anybody but myself-I just fired up Notepad2 and changed the file encoding to UTF-8 (File -> Encoding -> UTF-8), making sure to also update the “encoding” attribute of the “<?xml” header tag from “utf-16″ to “utf-8″.
   
   Figure 1. Be sure to change the “encoding” attribute of your XML file when changing the file encoding.
   
   Figure 2. Before conversion – “Unicode BOM” (BOM = Byte Order Mark)
   
   Figure 3. After conversion – “UTF-8″
5. Import my BlogML export from Blogger into Wordpress (very straightforward–just try it). On the “completed” page of the import, it lists the posts that were imported, and at the bottom it gives a link to a permalinkmap.csv file which contains a mapping of old permalinks to new permalinks. I downloaded that file and saved it for use later.

General Configuration

Finally, I needed to set up my redirects. Using the permalinkmap.csv file I downloaded, I ran the following PowerShell one-liner to create a text file containing entries that I copied into my “.htaccess” file (my hosting company uses LAMP):

import-csv permalinkmap.csv |% { $oldurl = ($_.OldPermalink -replace “http://www.aaronlerch.com”, “”); “redirect 301 $oldurl ” + $_.NewPermalink } | out-file htaccessredirectdata.txt

It simply creates a list of redirect commands that end up looking something like this:
redirect 301 /blog/2007/08/uri.html http://www.aaronlerch.com/blog/2007/08/21/uri-purity/

Finally, I needed to set up redirects for my archive files. Those were all stored in a single “archive” subfolder by Blogger, which I had locally as part of my original backup. This PowerShell one-liner output more redirect commands for me to copy into my .htaccess file:

dir archive | select Name |% { ($_ -match “([0-9]{4})_([0-9]{2})_.*”) | out-null; “redirect 301 /blog/archive/” + $_.Name + ” http://www.aaronlerch.com/blog/” + $matches[1] + “/” + $matches[2] + “/” } | out-file archivehtaccessdata.txt

This short command takes a file named “2007_08_01_archive.html” and produces the following redirect line:
redirect 301 /blog/archive/2007_08_01_archive.html http://www.aaronlerch.com/blog/2007/08/

Cleanup

What good blog migration would be complete with out some cleanup? The export/import process mangled some special characters various blog writing tools I’ve used inserted. Not to mention code examples getting new-lines removed. (Beware!) A quick visual skim and it was all fixed up.

Conclusion

So what do we take away from all this? A few things:

• Cleanly migrating between blogging platforms sucks. It’s not straightforward, and “clean” is in the eye of the beholder.
• If you ever want to migrate from Blogger to Wordpress, you’ve hopefully found some help here. At a higher (even more helpful) level, if you ever want to export from Blogger to BlogML, or import from BlogML to Wordpress, you’ve got some tools and guidance.

Technorati Tags: blogml, blogger, wordpress, powershell

I’m going to do you all a favor, though. I’m going to apply my patented “Lerch technique” to sum up Jeff’s entire thoughtful, well-written, fantastic post. Get ready, here it comes. Here’s how you avoid cliché blogging: use common sense.

More and more I am becoming convinced that a mature, well-informed, and empathetic common sense is one of the best guides a person can have.

I suppose the real problem is that much of what Jeff wrote about really isn’t common sense to most people. For those people, maybe the Ethic of Reciprocity (aka The Golden Rule) can help. Blog unto others as you would have them blog unto you.

Really, it comes down to understanding three general things:

1. People always interact with your blog first for content, and then sometimes for “you”. The more “stuff” that gets in the way of that objective, the less likely people are to read, and continue reading.
2. Many people (not all) read in syndication readers – your site layout should be secondary, there to serve those who find you by accident search and those who come to participate in the comments.
3. Google is your best friend. While it is important to tag posts, I find that when I’m trying to locate a post on someone’s site I usually have a general recollection of its content and nothing more. But that’s more than enough for Google. For example, Jeff posted about developers creating UIs, which for me translates into a Google search for “developer ui site:codinghorror.com“. Bam, done. Common sense says, though, that “search plus browse” is the best answer–so tag those posts.

If you forget everything (and you probably already have), remember these three words: use common sense!