Migrating from DasBlog to WordPress

So I don’t really Blog very much anyway, but that just means, that I want to keep all the entries that I have created over the past 5 years.  In moving to a new Blog, I don’t want to just dump the old stuff. 

WordPress is pretty popular with the group I work with, so that is what I decided to go with.  The problem…  there isn’t an importer for WordPress from DasBlog.  I did a search and came up with a few good posts, but I am not as knowledgeable as I should be so it took a little work to figure it all out.  This is the post that gave me the most help:
http://www.kavinda.net/2008/10/23/migrating-from-dasblog-to-wordpress.html

Here is what I did:

 

  1. Build a server – I am using Server 2008 x64 Standard
    1. Install the IIS Role
    2. Install IIS Role Services
    3. Download and install the URL Rewrite Module http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/465/url-rewrite-module-configuration-reference/
  2. Setup MySQL
    1. I just went to http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/ and downloaded the latest version.  I had a little bit of trouble with the install, because I tried to use a password with quotes in it.
  3. Setup PHP
    1. Again, I just went to http://www.php.net/downloads.php and downloaded the latest version.  I believe I had to select the CGI setup, but I don’t remember for sure… 
  4. Copy old web site content to new server (I have other things on the site besides the Blog)
    1. The nice thing about my situation is that I can leave the old stuff in production while I  figure out the new stuff.  Copying my old stuff over (minus the old Blog) was very simple.
  5. Create web site and point to the directory that I copied over.
    1. Also, I had to set the default document as index.php for the Blog
    2. Setup URL Rewrite to get “Pretty URLs”
  6. Export old Blog content
    1. This was the hard part.  I used a utility that I downloaded from http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/DasBlogML to convert my posts to BlogML.
    2. Then I used  the import module that I got from http://www.kavinda.net/content/other/BlogML-WordPress-Import.zip
    3. The import leaves a handy little permalinkmap.csv file.  I used Excel and Notepad to change it up a little bit to make lines that looked like: http://www.nukeitmike.com/blog/2009/02/18/ldquoFailedToSetEventLoggingrdquoErrorWhenLoggingIntoCitrixApps.aspx,http://nim.nukeitmike.com/Blog/2009/02/18/failed-to-set-event-logging-error-when-logging-into-citrix-apps/ look like <add key=”/2009/02/18/ldquoFailedToSetEventLoggingrdquoErrorWhenLoggingIntoCitrixApps.aspx” value=”/2009/02/18/failed-to-set-event-logging-error-when-logging-into-citrix-apps/” />  
    4. Add URL Rewrite to enable old links to get to the new post address.  With IIS 7 and the URL Rewrite module you can add the lines that were created in the above step to the webconfig file to get the old links to point to the new links.

So even though this is an exceptionally long post compared to most that make, I didn’t include most of the details…  guess you will just have to ask if you need to know…

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