As I mentioned in my earlier post, switching from Blogger to dasBlog really wasn't all that difficult. In fact, the hardest part was getting my data out of Blogger and Haloscan, not getting it into dasBlog. With that said, its always nice if other people don't have to reinvent the wheel, so here is everything you need to do in order to switch from Blogger to dasBlog in the most complete way possible.
Getting Your Data Out of Blogger: I had been hosting my blog on a blogspot address. In order to get Blogger posts and comments into a useable format, you will need to change several settings on your blog, and change your template. Then you need to republish your blog to an FTP site so that your blogspot address won't be affected, and so you can easily download the resulting data to your computer.
Step 1: Change Your Settings All the setting changes that I describe here will make sure that the resulting XML file you will download will be as clean as possible, and have the data in the most useable format.
First turn off Quick Editing and Email Post links. This will make sure that Blogger doesn't try to insert extra CSS or Javascript into your XML. This may be unnecessary, since your template won't have a <HEAD> tag, but I did it to be safe.
Change your time stamp format for both your posts and your comments. This will ensure that all dates and times in the XML file can be easily read into a DateTime object by the Importing tool later.
Step 2: Set Your Blog to FTP Publishing This will make sure that your blogspot blog won't get overwritten while you're doing your exporting. It also makes it easy to get your XML files when you're done, and allows you to turn off the Blogger Navbar. You can only turn off the Blogger Navbar if you're using FTP publishing. Once again, it may not be necessary to turn it off since you won't have a <HEAD> tag, but it's probably a good idea.
Step 2: Change Your Template Download the following template, and copy the text into the template area of Blogger. Don't forget to save your old template for when you're done! This template will create a blank index.html file, and blank post files, but all the archive files will have your XML data in it (even though they still have the html extension). I used monthly archiving, so this worked out well. You could try to just use the index page, but if you have more than a few months worth of posts, Blogger won't allow you to put every post on the index page. Likewise, you could put each post in it's own XML page using the <$ItemPage$> tag, but if you've been blogging for as long as I have, then you will have hundreds of files to download. Also, you'll want to turn off the Navbar.
Step 3: Republish your entire blog. Once that is finished, use your favorite FTP program to download all the archive files to your computer.
Importing Your Content Into dasBlog: The first thing you need is the Importer program I wrote. If you just want the executable, that is here (requires the .NET Framework v1.1 to run). The source is available here. Unzip the binaries to a directory on your computer, and run Importer.exe.
The Source Directory is the directory on your computer where you downloaded the archive files to. The Destination Directory is where the dasBlog XML files will be outputted to. You can import old posts with a default category if you'd like. I chose Old Blog, but if you don't want a default category, then leave this blank. The username to import with is the username you will use for posting in dasBlog. By default this is admin. The checkbox for converting line breaks to paragraph was because of the template I use on this blog. Blogger by default will insert line breaks in your post which this template didn't render well. So I replaced all double line breaks with paragraph tags.
If you use Haloscan for trackbacks, check the Import Haloscan checkbox, and type in your Haloscan username. Please note, that if you check this box, importing will take a significantly longer amount of time because for every post you import, the Importer has to hit the Haloscan server. Unfortunately, Haloscan provides no way to export your trackbacks, but they do provide an RSS feed for each of your posts. Using that RSS feed in combination with the trackback display page, I'm able to get all the information about your trackbacks and import them into dasBlog. It just takes a while. When I imported The Coding Monkey (which didn't have trackbacks), it took about one minute. Importing The World According to Nick (which did have trackbacks) took more than half an hour.
After the Importer has run, copy the contents from the Destination Directory to the /content directory of the server where you have dasBlog installed. If you're running dasBlog locally, you could set the Destination Directory to output the files directly to the content directory of your dasBlog instance.
Forward People from Blogger to Your New Blog: The last step of course is to point people to the content on your new blog. This requires you to modify your current Blogger template (you know, the one you saved before you replaced it with the XML template.) All you have to do is add the following code to the <HEAD> section of your existing template:
<Blogger>
<MainPage>
<meta http-equiv="REFRESH" content="2; URL=http://www.nickschweitzer.net">
</MainPage>
<ItemPage>
<meta http-equiv="REFRESH" content="2; URL=http://www.nickschweitzer.net/PermaLink.aspx?guid=<$BlogItemNumber$>">
</ItemPage>
</Blogger>
Obviously you'll want to change the base URL to your weblog location. And that is all it takes. I hope this helps anyone who is looking to move off of Blogger.