Yeah, so bmonday.com v3.0 went over like a lead balloon with the fans (hey nobody was more surprised than I was that I still have "fans" after going dark for nearly 2 months).
The problem with the new software was that all my old security articles and other useful posts were no longer accessible (yes, there have been some useful posts over the years, don't start with me). I got quite a few emails from people asking me what happened to a couple of unique articles, like the one about getting OpenSSH to work on Windows.
These articles were not easy to reproduce in the new blog engine because, well, I didn't have easy access to them myself thanks to a series of unfortunate events involving my SQL database, and Google doesn't seem to cache my articles (only my posts).
There was also the fact that I was completely underwhelmed by the new blog engine, Graffiti, which made me fairly unmotivated about writing overall.
So I spent the night (and wee hours of the morning) getting my data out of my old .Text database and into its successor, subText. For those that don't know (and why would you), the guy that wrote dotText stopped developing it several years ago, and it was subsequently buried into Community Server, a commercial venture (and the same people that make Graffiti). But some good folks picked up the last release of dotText and forked it, carrying it forward.
Luckily enough people have wanted to move from dotText to subText that a few scripts have been written to ease the process. One of the scripts fixed subText so that all my article and post permalinks still work with the new software. It still needed some tweaks before it would work, but I persevered in the end and got it going.
Most modern blog engines support BlogML now for import/export, so if we have to do this again it will be much easier. But let's hope it doesn't come to that. Interest and activity seems strong on subText, so hopefully it will be around a while.
I've got some cleanup to do still:
- I'm using a canned skin. I will work on beau-ifying it later once I figure out how much of my old skin I want to carry forward. unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be any easy way to migrate dotText skins to subText.
- Galleries are broken. Those didn't survive the migration (didn't expect them to). I may continue to rely on WHS to feed my galleries, I haven't yet decided.
- Some of the comments didn't migrate because they had odd characters in them. Those were mostly spam anyway, and I'm not going to bother trying to recover them.
Other than that, we should be largely back in business. The RSS feed should be working again as well, so those of you listening there should start seeing some fresh traffic on the site.
I'm really excited to get back to writing again.