Productive weekend
It’s been quite a weekend. I finally got fed up with dasBlog hanging the worker threads on my old blog site* so I decided to move all the content to Wordpress and start up a new blog. No single part of the process was hard, but there were a lot of moving pieces. Among other things, I:
- Wrote a C# app to convert all my dasBlog content into an RSS file for importing into Wordpress.
- Set up two Wordpress blogs (one to hold the archived content and one — this one — for future posts).
- Designed a set of Apache RewriteRules to handle the various permalinks that dasBlog uses.
- Wrote a C# app to generate the RewriteRules to map the old permalinks to the Wordpress permalinks.
- Set up 404 handlers and other redirection for old pages at tommyblogs.com.
- Wrote a Windows Forms apps to easily let me add Technorati and del.icio.us tags to my posts
What remains in the blog migration?
- Handle categories redirection
- Remap various Feedburner category feeds
- Monitor logs and see what I’ve missed
- Transfer the domain name from the current host to 1and1.com and save myself about $15 a month.
* Old blog site: tommyblogs.com. The problem (I think) was actually happening due to — what else? — spammers. They were hitting my site with some generic comment post code. They weren’t even bothering to see what fields were there, they were just POSTing to the forms. Somehow, though, this was corrupting the ViewState on the pages and dasBlog didn’t have the exception handling in place to deal with it. In fact, it was apparently throwing up dialog boxes. When enough of these things hit, I consumed all the threads available to me (since there was no one on the server to click “OK” on the dialog), and the site was hung until I emailed the hosting provider and asked them to cycle my site.
Welcome to PHP-hacking hell my friend. But yeah, I was wonder wth was going on, with your bold resolutions for the new year and all ;-)
PHP hacking isn’t new to me. I was quite adept back in the days before I started working at Microsoft. I was hired here, in fact, for my experience with Apache, Perl, and FreeBSD. Of course, that was PHP3….
It felt very nice to put together some RewriteRules again.
Did you file a bug? We’ve been fixing a whole slew of bugs latley. Or were there other reasons you switched?
No, I didn’t file a bug. I don’t think I know enough about the problem to file a reasonable bug — just what I’ve been able to piece together after many server restart requests. It was on a hosted site, so I only had FTP access.
Basically, though, it was just enough of a push to send me back to the comfortable (for me) world of command-line-hosted sites. I love being able to ssh to the site and to control the Web server by editing .htaccess files. It’s what I “grew up” with.
I’ve been fascinated by Wordpress’s plug-in model since I first heard about it and the broad community of people writing these plug-ins is encouraging.
That’s really odd. It’s physically not possible for DasBlog to “throw a dialog” so I suspect your ISP didn’t have their JIT Debugger settings correct – .
As far as error handling in DasBlog, we have a global error handler that dumps the complete call stack to the logs. We don’t have a custom thread pool, we just use the ASP.NET one.
If the JIT Debugger is incorrectly configured and a dialog pops up then ALL threads wait. That’s an IIS Debugging thing, again, not DasBlog.
For what it’s worth, we have extensive SPAM controls in place now. I get about 30,000 legit hits a day and block over 10,000 spam attempts.
Either way, I’m sorry you had a bad experience! It sucks.
Oops…I messed up the tags in that comment. Sorry.
I meant to link here
Here’s the strange thing: I’m not the only one reporting the problem with dialog boxes popping up with dasBlog. Richard Tallent is saying the same thing: Need New Blogging Software
Ya, I just saw that. Are you both running DasBlog under .NET 2.0?
I was having a problem before switching to Whidbey — in fact, it was the hung threads that prompted me to switch over in the first place. I’m pretty sure I remember Richard saying that he’s running it under .NET 2.0.
Ya, I’ve been working with Richard. His problem is some new tightening of security in 2.0 along with the JIT dialog being configured for developer, not runtime. I very much suspect the same problem for you.
hi nice site.