Site Migration

I've decided to move my blog off of Blogger. Blogger was great for getting started, but it has just become too painful to fight with going forward. I'm sick of fighting the Blogger templating to force it to display my content the way that I want it to. Blogger has a habit of absolutely mangling the html that I try to post. For posts consisting mostly of plain-text and images, this is not that big a problem, but I have to spend a ton of time trying to get code-heavy posts to render in a readable way. Over the last year, I've spent far more time tweaking my posted html to get it right than it has taken me in the last week to write a home-rolled blog engine for this new site to use, even counting extracting my existing content out of Blogger and converting it into a new format.

Beyond that, there are a number of things that I would like to do going forward that I simply cannot do easily with Blogger, but I can do very easily if I have control over the site. I'm far more comfortable writing html, javascript and server-side code than I will ever be at bending Blogger to my will.

I'm sure there will be some speedbumps, but I think this is a much better solution for me, and ultimately, for you, readers. I'm nowhere near finished, but I think I've got the essentials ironed out, so I'm going to go ahead with the switch-over.

Things that should still work:

• Existing links to my page should still be valid, at least for content. I've put in quite a bit of effort trying to get the old-style Blogger urls to play nicely with my new site
• All of the old content has been imported.
• Images should still be fine, since those were all externally hosted and I haven't swapped those out yet. Eventually, I'd like to serve all my screenshots locally, so I can convert them to jpegs so pages will load faster (most are loss-less PNGs right now).

Things that are broken

• Comments are disabled for the moment. Extracting the primary content from Blogger was enough of a pain, so I haven't bothered with the old comments yet. I also need to add server-side support for comments. If you have any questions about any of the tutorials in the meantime, at the top of each post is a link with my name that will allow you to send me an email. I'll try to get back to you as quickly as I can.
• Rss feeds - From my analytics, I don't think anybody actually used the blog feed that Blogger provided, but I'm not going to bother with implementing one for the new site unless there is some demand or I have some spare time and get inspired.
• Some of the older posts might look a little wonky. I'm going through them as I have time and making sure that the content I extracted from Blogger renders decently, but it is time-consuming. Particularly some of the oldest posts, when I was still using the online Blogger editor, before I standardized my workflow on Windows Live Writer, may be a little bit off.

Thanks for bearing with me. If you notice anything unusual, feel free to send me an email, it would be very helpful in pinpointing issues.