Sunday, January 09, 2005
DotText2DasBlog beta released

I searched for something that would move my DotText over to DasBlog, and didn't see anything handy.  Since I've got the DB here, and theres the DasBlog web service, I was able to throw something together in about 30 minutes to handle it. 

Currently it will move entries only.  No comments, no categories, just entries.  The main reason I want to import my entries is for searching them in DasBlog, so I'm not that worried about the old stuff.  If others seem interested, I might add some more to this though.

Heres a screenshot:

Grab the source code here

[Edit]

There have been a number of updates since this post.  Please follow this link to get the details on the newer releases.  Thanks



1/23/2005 3:53:01 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
Thats awesome! I'd actually love to just have a tool that could do comments too!
1/23/2005 3:53:01 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
I actually started working on Categories last night, and can work on comments later this week. It should be easy too, so I should def be able to add both this week.
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<br>I wonder if the DasBlog crew has an &quot;official&quot; feature list for the importer? I could try to fulfill some or all of that list if it exists. I'll look for that tonight.
1/23/2005 3:53:01 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
Wow great tool Aaron... really useful for the community.
1/23/2005 3:53:01 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
1/23/2005 3:53:01 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
1/23/2005 3:53:01 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
.Text to DasBlog Conversion Tool Found!
1/23/2005 3:53:01 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
Only a little request for you Aaron... actually the tool requires that you have direct access to the .Text database server, and in most cases users don't have it (many users are not administrators of the blog engine). Why not use the .Text webservice to extract posts and not the connection string?
1/23/2005 3:53:02 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
I had thought about that earlier in the development, but didn't go down that road since I was really just making this to help with my blog migration, which was local. There seems to be quite a bit of interest around this little app, though, so it's probably important to move to a web service based approach as opposed to direct connection. I'd like to leave it as an option since the speed of the update would be orders of magnitude faster over a direct connection, but also want to keep the utility simple, so I might just ditch the direct connection option for now.
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<br>I plan on spending some time with this tonight. The first thing I will look at is moving to a web services approach. I just took a quick look at the services and they should provide the functionality this would need, so it really shouldn't be too big of an issue to move it that way. Even moving to the web service, I'd like to see another beta out this week. The quicker the better since rolling my new dasblog blog will rely on this :)
1/23/2005 3:53:02 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
Why not use the .Text web service to grab all the entries?
1/23/2005 3:53:02 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
I couldn't find any part of the service that would return the comments. If I'm missing it then I'd love to know :)
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1/23/2005 3:53:02 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
It looks like the files are no longer online. Any chance you can get them reposted or the source code online so that someone can get them working again?
1/23/2005 3:53:02 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
The url for this release is outdated. I have since changed the archive names. I'll update this post's link as a pointer back to the category so people can see the latest release. Thanks for pointing that out.


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