I first found out about
dasBlog about a month ago when
I attended Deeper in .NET, a conference sponsored by
WI-INETA. One of the speakers was
Scott Hanselman, who is one of the primary contributors to dasBlog. I personally thought he was the best speaker of the bunch, and though he didn't talk an awful lot about dasBlog specifically, he mentioned enough to get me interested, since I had been thinking about moving off of
Blogger for a while at that point. I also thought that anything this guy was involved in was probably going to be pretty damn good. So far I haven't been disappointed. My problem is that the tools I used for blogging to this point, Blogger and
Haloscan (for trackbacks) were both black boxes. Though they worked well in general, you never had access to the back end data, and could only use their web interfaces to do things. Customization was difficult to say the least. Of course, this also means that getting your data out of these services would take some work also, but that is a subject for my next post. For me, there were several requirements for picking my new blogging engine:
Must Be Extendable: This was probably my biggest frustration with Blogger. Although you could do a lot with the templates if you worked at, it lacked certain basic features, and they seemed in no hurry to add any. This meant that I was constantly trying to pull features in from other services to complete my blog package. It made things much more difficult than it needed to be. Although many people prefer WordPress for switching from Blogger, because it's written in PHP (which I only have a cursory knowledge of), customization would be harder for me. Because dasBlog is written in C#, which I know like the back of my hand, customization for me is extremely trivial. In fact, I've already written several macros which are being used on my blogs, which took about a total of 1 hour to write and test.
Had to Run Locally: I wanted to be able to run a version of my blog locally on my laptop. This would allow me to do all the importing and testing locally on my machine, before I even bought server space. That way I could get everything exactly as I wanted it before I moved to my server. This goes hand in hand with picking a .NET blog engine, because I already have all the tools available on my laptop without any extra configuration. WordPress requires PHP and MySQL to run... neither of which I have. dasBlog only requires ASP.NET with no database requirements since it uses XML files as its datastore. This has an added advantage of making it cheaper to host, since most hosting services charge extra if you want to run an instance of a database on your domain.
Import Old Content: I had to be able to import all my old content. That means posts, comments and trackbacks. Though getting this data out of Blogger was going to be a pain no matter what, I wanted to make sure that importing wouldn't also be difficult. dasBlog has an extremely well thought out Data Access Layer that made this process trivial. I can't stress enough how simple it really was to get my data into dasBlog.
Preserve Permlinks: They're permlinks, not templinks. I get a lot of hits via Google, am on many people's blogrolls, and have a lot of old posts which people have linked to while I've been blogging. One of my biggest blogging pet peeves is when you follow a permlink, and you find out that the blog has moved, but you simply get forwarded to the person's homepage. I wanted to make sure that I could change my Blogger template in such a way that people going to a specific post of mine would get forwarded to that same post on my new blog. Once again, dasBlog made this simple because you can pick the unique identifier for imported posts.
Active Developer Community: I wanted to make sure that whatever engine I chose was still being actively developed, and that there was an opportunity for me to get involved. I haven't really been heavily involved in any extra development since I was participating in Winamp3, and wanted to get involved in something again. dasBlog is still being actively developed on SourceForge, and there is an opportunity for me to get involved.
Extra Blogging Features: Of course, one of the primary reasons for moving off of Blogger was that it didn't offer certain basic features. I wanted Categories, built in Trackbacks, and built in file uploading. dasBlog does a very good job with all those things. In addition to that, it has built in ability to cross-post between multiple sites (which is great since I was doing that manually from time to time between my two blogs), and has a really sweet search engine that outputs search results using your template with word highlighting.
Don't worry, my next post will include all the steps and code that I wrote to do everything I've described here so that if you want, you too can move from Blogger to dasBlog.