I’ve been thinking about it for a while now, move my blog from Miniblog to a different platform. The most obvious choice would be migrating to Miniblog.Core, however, there are a couple of features missing (like themes) and Open Live Writer isn’t a very modern tool for blogging anymore.

Of course, both of them are open source, so I could spend a lot of time fixing the issues. But as with most of us, our schedule is already packed with a lot of other side-projects.

Static sites

Seeing my blog is rather static, I don’t need the power .NET Framework/Core offers me. A static site generator will suffice. I’ve used such a platform for my Keto site (https://keto.jan-v.nl/), which is generated via Hugo.

Hugo has a steep learning curve, but it does offer a lot of flexibility and features. Being familiar with the product was a nice benefit and the main reason to migrate my blog to Hugo and not some other generator. The migration got kickstarted by one of my 4DotNet colleagues, Eduard Keilholz, who has started blogging some time ago and also decided to use Hugo. Seeing him use Hugo convinced me to migrate ASAP!

The biggest problem I had is moving 13+ years of content to a different format. In the past, I’ve been using several other systems, like SharePoint, Orchard, Miniblog and my custom PHP framework. This means there’s a lot of legacy stuff and the formatting of the posts isn’t in a consistent state. It’s all HTML in the end, but when you take a look at the actual code you’ll get scared pretty quick.

The past couple of days I’ve been working on migrating my blog from the Orchard CMS to MiniBlog. The main reason for me to migrate to a different system is because I don’t work a lot with Orchard anymore. There were also some crashes from time to time which I couldn’t explain.

I’m currently hosting my websites on Azure Websites, because of that I didn’t feel much for using a database system. SQL Azure is very nice of course, but it can also be quite expensive, especially if you don’t really need the features. The alternative is SQL Compact, but I’m not very keen on using this as well.

While searching for a database-less blogging system, I came across several solutions like Ghost, Jekyll and MiniBlog. All of these systems are slightly different and work with different techniques. The main reason I’m using MiniBlog as my new blogging engine is because it’s based on .NET. I could list all the cool features which are included, but as it’s already stated on the GitHub page, I won’t repeat it over here.

MiniBlog is a system which saves it’s posts in XML files. Therefore, I had to migrate all of my posts from the Orchard database to the files which MiniBlog understands. There’s already a project on GitHub called MiniBlogFormatter. This tool is able to export posts from DasBlog, BlogEngine.NET and WordPress to the MiniBlog format. I’ve used the code from this project as a basis for exporting my own Orchard posts.