erikzaadi.com

ZNAG - Browsing Blog Migration

1. Moving from Webhost4life to Arvixe

   May 23

   posted by erikzaadi In : Blog, Blog Migration, webhost4life, arvixe | Comments (1)

   Webhost4life was my first hosting provider, I joined their service at November 2009.

   Although their support was… not very technical, and REALLY slow on response time, I was able to solve most problems I had by myself.

   In the middle of January, they announced that their moving to a new and improved platform, and they even had this fancy "transition kiosk" that was suppose to find and resolve all potential migration problems automatically.

   I looked at the new platforms control panel, and got the impression that this might really be an improvement.

   After they migrated the account, it took about a month of nerve wrecking support calls, and my own manual attempts to fix their crappy ISAPI Rewrite templates to get my applications somewhat working.

   Even then, all my .net apps were broken since they changed the way they worked with sub domains in a way that ruined all links generated by .net (E.G. using a simple Url.Content("~/") would return an invalid path).

   After a furious support log where I threatened to sue them, they finally moved me back the old platform.

   Everything was back to normal.

   Suddenly, at the beginning of May, I got an email from webhost4life saying that a migration must take place until May 17, since they old servers will no longer be active after that date.

   Due to my history with the infamous new and "improved" platform, I asked the following at a support call:

   

   Webhost4life had integrated a new control panel (although in beta of course), so I had some slight hopes that this time it'd work.

    

   After the migration, nothing worked.

   Their incompetent support where not even able to get a simple index.html working.

   

   

   This time I didn't wait a month to get a partially working site.

   After some nice tweeple suggested some hosting providers,  I choose Arvixe, and so far they've been great.

   Arvixe .net support are far superior to webhost4life, they even have .net 4 support.

   Small disclaimer, I'm in no way affiliated with Arvixe , I'm simply a satisfied customer (so far).

   They prices are cheaper, and you don't need to pay for the domain name, which saves you about ten bucks a year.

    

   So what really happened with webhost4life?

   They were a rather solid hosting provider with good .net support, but unfortunately, they were bought by Endurance International Group, who decided to make changes, radical changes there.

   There are plenty "webhost4life's new platform ruined my site" , I think the best is : http://fhemsher.blogspot.com/

    

   Erik

   Tags: Blog, Blog Migration, webhost4life, arvixe

   
   

2. Blog Migration – Part – 4 – Connecting Windows Live Writer to the AtomSite blog

   Dec 06

   posted by Erik Zaadi In : Blog, Blog Migration, AtomSite | Comments (4)

   Previous Posts : 1 | 2 | 3

   This post took me a while to get together, it's actually the first blog post I'm writing from Windows Live Writer on this blog..

   To be able to write and manage posts efficiently, you need to connect with a good desktop program, with offline capabilities such as preview, saving drafts etc.

   Windows Live Writer is the perfect application for me, as unfortunately I don't get to spend much time on the Mac side of life..

   For most atomsite blog users, connecting Windows Live Writer to their blogs should be rather strait forward, if it doesn't work as per the guide, removing the "WindowsAuthenticationModule" at the web.config file (as explain per the troubleshooting guide) should get you started promptly..

   However, in a imperfect world of shared hosting, you can not always control such settings, as they are locked by default by IIS on the root level (in the applicationHost.config file).

   I tried to work around this problem with using different desktop blogging tools, and by trying to get my hosting provider to unlock the setting (Coming soon in a post, rather amusing actually).

   I downloaded the source for the atomsite blog engine, and started hacking away on their code, to find at least a viable workaround for this annoying problem.

   It turns out that Windows Live Writer is actually making several requests to the blog, and not always sending the authentication details.

   I managed to do a rather ugly hack that allows me to work with Windows Live Writer for now.

   I'm still working on a better solution for this, as the solution I ended up with is not something usable for any other atomsite deployment.

   If anyone is interested in the hack/solution post a comment on this post, mail contact[at]erikzaadi[dot]com or simply drop me a tweet. [UPDATE] Download Details in this post

   Erik

   Tags: Blog, Blog Migration, AtomSite

   
   

3. Blog Migration - Part 3 - Exporting Posts From Blogger To Atomsite

   Nov 25

   posted by erikzaadi In : Blog, Blog Migration, AtomSite | Comments (0)

   Previous Parts : 1 , 2

   Blogger are awesome in many ways, but if there's one feature missing, it's a way to import/export to other blog engines.

    

   BlogML is a standard that several other blog engines are starting to support.

    

   AtomSite supports BlogML integration from version 1.3
   (Note : This is not the version shipped in the web platform installer).

    

   I used a superb tool called BlogExporter, which exported all of my posts, comments and tags
   from my Blogger account to a nice little XML file.

   Unfortunately, this XML file can not be imported as is to AtomSite, it needs a bit of massaging..

   I exported the default blog that ships with the installation of AtomSite,
   to a BlogML XML file, and then compared the with the result from BlogExporter.

   I noticed that a couple of tags where missing regarding the author of the blog, namely the email and title:

   <authors>
       <author approved="true"
        created="2009-11-04T17:39:28.1678914+02:00"
        email="my.mail@gmail.com"
        id="Erik Zaadi"
        modified="2009-11-04T17:39:28.1678914+02:00"><title>Erik</title>
    </author>
   </authors>
   

   The <extended-properties /> tag needed to be replace with the following:

   <extended-properties>
    <property>
    <Key>CommentModeration</Key>
    <Value>Authenticated</Value>
    </property>
    <property>
    <Key>SendTrackback</Key>
    <Value>No</Value>
    </property>
    </extended-properties>
   

   Altering those values in the XML file allowed me to import the posts to AtomSite smoothly.

    

   Stay tuned for the next post about connecting AtomSite to Windows Live Writer..

    

   Erik

   Tags: Blog, Blog Migration, AtomSite

   
   

4. Blog Migration - Part 2 - Temporary Pages

   Nov 22

   posted by erikzaadi In : Blog, Blog Migration, AtomSite | Comments (2)

   Previously :  Part 1 - Setting up

   After getting my self my little virtual corner on the webospere,  it was time to get some content up before getting all the final sites up.

   Steps:

   1. "No 404 for me"

      A small "Under construction" page ,with a typical 90's under construction gif look

   2. Linking my existing (sub)sites: I added two CNAME records:

      Blogger Account  : http://blogger.erikzaadi.com => http://erikzaadi.blogspot.com

      Project Pages : http://projects.erikzaadi.com => http://erikzaadi.github.com

   3. Setting up the root of the site:

      I started to throw together a small asp.net mvc project for the root of the site , both to test the hosting server's MVC and DB capabilities.
      Besides overdoing the grey gradient theme to death, I think I exaggerated a bit with the fly thing at the 404 and Error Page.

   4. Getting the blog working

      I installed AtomSite on http://blog.erikzaadi.com and started playing around a bit with the theme.
      Again, as you can see, I'm still with the grey gradient look (will I ever grow tired of it?).

   Stick around for the next post, which will be about migrating my blogger posts into the AtomSite powered blog.

    

    

   Cherios,

    

   Erik

   Tags: Blog, Blog Migration, AtomSite

   
   

5. Blog Migration - Part 1 - Setting Up Domain and Hosting Server

   Nov 17

   posted by erikzaadi In : Blog, Blog Migration, AtomSite | Comments (2)

   Part 2

   This is the first part in a series I'll be doing, describing the process I went through while migrating my blogger blog to a hosted blog with the atomsite blog engine.

   Why migrate my blog you ask?

   Well, although Google offers blogger as one of their great free services, I wanted more control, and to have the blog engine in a programming language that I'm a bit more fluent with.

   Purchasing a domain:

   Besides just buying one, there were three things that bothered me:

    

   Whois

   Looking up domain names is very easy nowadays, and it can lead to a lot of spam and forgery attempts.

   Most companies that offer domains has a Whois protection program, usually for an extra buck or two, well worth in my honest opinion.

    

   DNS

   I wanted to be able to control subdomains and cname records.

    

   Name

   This might seem as a silly thing, especially with the name I chose in the end, but this was one of the most time consuming steps of migrating my blog.

   I tried to think of a catchy name, but in the end, I just went with my twitter account name convention.

    

   Choosing a hosting provider:

   The features I was looking for were:

    

   Subdomains and cname handling

   Comfortable control panel

   IIS7 based, ready for asp.net mvc, with PHP modules installed

   MSSQL Database available

   Reasonable amount of disk space

    

   I researched a bit, read both good and bad reviews of several hosting providers.

   I must say that I didn't encounter any web hosting company that didn't have complaints.

   In the end I chose webhost4life, both for hosting and purchasing (and managing) the domain name.

   I can't say that they've been the best experience, I'll probably blog about that in the future, but they've worked good enough so far.

    

   Part 2

   Erik

   Tags: Blog, Blog Migration, AtomSite