I'm going to put off rolling over the blog for a little bit.  This is mainly since I doubt I will be moving forward with movabletype.  MT is a fantastic product, but I just had a bad feeling about introducing ActivePerl and MySql into my environment.  Since I host my own blog, I had this feeling of void not knowing what was going on inside the blog.  I also had no idea even how to backup and restore mysql, let alone administer is.  So in the end MT it was fun, but I have to say goodbye.

The problem is I really like how MT works.  It's template engine is fantastically simple yet capable, and I also really like the out of the box end user experience with MT.  Based on my experience adding podcasting to .Text, I knew modifying .Text to do what I was looking for would be out of the question. 

Enter DasBlog.

Not knowing what to expect, I grabbed the latest source off of GDN for DasBlog, and started up with that.  I had originally passed on DasBlog because of it's lack of SqlServer support, but then figured I don't get anywhere NEAR the traffic of say a Scott Hanselman, so I'm sure I will be ok without Sql Server.

I was up and going with DasBlog in about 20 minutes, and started diving into it right away.  The first thing I noticed is it had somewhat of a template system, using the .blogtemplate files as a partial direction on how to render pages.  Not quite like MT template, but still quite usable.  I quickly modified the source and added support for multiple templates (separate post on that), and suddenly DasBlog was looking damn good.  Within an hour of installing it I was able to setup a basic blog, AND modify the source to support multiple templates. 

I started doing a bit more research on DasBlog, and ended up spending a good portion of the weekend working on a replacement for the MT blog I just finished.  I think DasBlog will be a keeper.  I was able to move all of the HTML and stylesheets over in a couple hours, and although there are some features not in DasBlog yet, the newest source off SourceForge includes enclosure support.  Nice.  It also looks like development has picked up on it greatly in the past few months.  Even better.

I should have a public dasblog no later then Tuesday, and hopefully move over either next week or weekend.  Also, anyone know any .Text -> DasBlog converters?  I'm sure it will be pretty simple since I can get to my .Text DB and DasBlog has web services into it, so if I can't find any I'll post some details here.