It looks like lots of changes are going on here. First off, I am now working in C# full-time since I took a job with SpiderLogic. I think this is going to be a great opportunity for me to expand and grow again. I doubt I will ever be out of Delphi completely, but my new focus is definitely going to be on .NET. As such, I contacted DelphiFeeds to tell them to use just my Delphi category. Someone contacted me after a VS.NET post and mentioned that it seemed strange to see that on the Delphi feed, and I agreed. I don't want to clutter a very good Delphi resource up with blog posts about a competing IDE and/or language. However, if you like what you read here, I would encourage you to subscribe to my main feed, too.

The other change is on my blog. With prompting from Steve Trefethen, I made the switch to dasBlog. I had set dasBlog up for our internal blog at my last place of employment, and it worked great. I got tired of the lack of options that .Text provided, so I felt I had to do something. dasBlog provides a couple of features that I really wanted, like searching and better spam prevention. In addition, it's actively being developed.

Converting was fairly painless. I read a post by Scott Hanselman about migrating to dasBlog, and from there I found some code to help automate the conversion. There are several dead links out there, so finding this one was a definite time saver. I changed the code slightly to get categories out of .Text and into dasBlog. I changed the main SQL statement to the one below, and then just added a line of code to add that category information to the dasBlog conversion code. This works for me because I didn't use multiple categories for a post.

SELECT 
  blog_Content.ID, blog_Content.Title, blog_Content.DateAdded, blog_Content.SourceUrl, blog_Content.PostType, 
  blog_Content.Author, blog_Content.Email, blog_Content.SourceName, blog_Content.BlogID, blog_Content.Description, 
  blog_Content.DateUpdated, blog_Content.TitleUrl, blog_Content.Text, blog_Content.ParentID, blog_Content.FeedBackCount, 
  blog_Content.PostConfig, blog_Content.EntryName, blog_LinkCategories.Title AS CategoryTitle
FROM blog_Content 
  LEFT OUTER JOIN blog_Links ON blog_Links.PostID = blog_Content.ID 
  LEFT OUTER JOIN blog_LinkCategories ON blog_Links.CategoryID = blog_LinkCategories.CategoryID

I was worried about old URLs that were used from my .Text blog, but the later versions of dasBlog already do URL rewriting to make that transition absolutely seamless. I also use w.bloggar for writing my entires, so I had to change some settings to get that to work with dasBlog. Lastly, I updated my RSS feed to use FeedBurner.

All in all, I'm quite happy with how things turned out. If you see any problems, please feel free to let me know.