More Than Four

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Category: BlogEngine.NET

Migrating to WordPress 5.4 from BlogEngine.NET

August 6, 2020 / / 2 Comments

Lisa and I are probably the last people on the planet to still be using BlogEngine.NET for our blogs. Hey, if it works… don’t upgrade it.

Many other respected folks out there have described their process of moving their blog to WordPress, and I’m indebted to them. In this post, I’ll add my notes on the whole experience. Maybe someone out there will find it interesting and helpful.

Overview

Here’s the basic process:

  • Export your posts from BlogEngine.NET admin as BlogML
  • Save your image and attachment files
  • Create a new (empty) WordPress site
  • upload the image and attachment files to the /wp-content/upload folder
  • Obtain and install the BlogML Importer plugin for WordPress
  • Perform some simple text find-and-replace on the BlogML file
  • Tools->Import the BlogML file

In Practice

I hit some potholes… The image link replacements were all straight-forward but required some planning on how the sites were going to be switched. I definitely wanted to keep the same name of the blog site directory (I think it is no secret that it was and is “morethanfour”.)

So the change is minimal – replacing the BlogEngine.NET-specific “/image.axd?picture=” hrefs with “/wp-content/uploads/” path.

It was more complicated than that due to my first importing into a local web root and reviewing the format of the imported posts, and fixing a few strange glitches (due to non-breaking spaces).

Once I was comfortable with the replacements and the final appearance of the imported posts, it was time to deploy to production. For me, this involved the following steps:

  • remove the ASP.NET application on the existing BlogEngine.NET site
  • rename the blog root from “morethanfour” to “old-blog-backup”
  • re-create the “morethanfour” directory
  • upload the WordPress 5.4 install files
  • create the associated blog-specific MySQL database and user
  • ensure that the server was running PHP 5.6 (or later, was not the default!)
  • run the WordPress install process
  • copy the image files (previously saved) into /wp-content/upload
  • copy the blogml-importer plugin into /wp-content/plugins (see below)
  • install/activate the plugin inside the WordPress Administration
  • Go to Tools > Import and run the BlogML Import (which is now available)
  • Follow the prompts

And that is basically it. The final results look great.

Concerning that blogml-importer plugin

The original site with the BlogML Import plugin is no longer available, although other locations have hosted it, including the one I eventually downloaded it from: http://pluginsroom.com/plugins/blogml-importer

The zip archive contains two files, blogml-importer.php and Xpath.class.php, and the second one is not compatible with PHP 5.6 and later. I hacked the Xpath.class.php until I could install the plugin into WordPress without errors.

I have attached my 5.6/7.2 compatible version, zipped, here:

blogml-importer_2020Download

Most of the other potholes aren’t really worth discussing because they were peculiar to differences in PHP version between my hosting provider and my own local (laptop) development site.

Windows Live Writer, Code Snippet, and embedded styles

May 22, 2018 / / 0 Comments

I’m a long-time fan of Windows Live Writer, which I can’t link you to because it is no longer available from Microsoft. (Search for Windows Live Essentials 2012 and maybe you’ll find something.)

Thankfully the project was moved into open-source and a variant of it is available today as Open Live Writer. That’s cool – but as of this writing, it does not support plug-ins.

Alas, I rely on a plug-in called “Code Snippet” by Leo Vildosola. So I’m sticking with the original Windows Live Writer for now.

Embittered Styles

Code Snippet is great for posting source code and similar monospace text blocks into the blog page. It also has the default option to emit embedded styles into the generated HTML code. This makes for a kind of nasty lowest-common denominator format, like this:

<pre id="codeSnippet" style="border-top-style: none; font-size: 8pt; overflow: visible; 
border-left-style: none; font-family: 'Courier New', courier, monospace; width: 100%; 
border-bottom-style: none; color: black; padding-bottom: 0px; direction: ltr; 
text-align: left; padding-top: 0px; border-right-style: none; padding-left: 0px; 
margin: 0em; line-height: 12pt; padding-right: 0px; background-color: #f4f4f4">

If you’re not paying attention, you can end up with a lot of blog posts with these “embittered” styles and end up with serviceable but not necessarily attractive text blocks. (raises hand).

This option can be switched off when authoring new blog posts. See that “Embed Styles” check-button in the UI?

imageIf you un-select that option, you get this generated instead:

<pre id="codeSnippet" class="csharpcode">This is a test without embedded styling</pre>

That’s quite a difference.

Now we get a CLASS attribute instead of the embedded styles, so if we want to improve upon the basic default <pre> tag style, we’ll obviously need to add a style to our CSS.

Note: no matter what language/syntax you choose in Code Snippet’s Language dropdown list, the emitted CLASS value will always be “csharpcode”. This could be confusing because you might not be pasting C# code into the snippet, but the CSS class doesn’t appear to be related.

image

OK, we can definitely live with this, and add a style directive to our CSS. But what about all those previous blog posts with text blocks with embedded styles?

This is !important

Up until today I always thought that embedded styles trumped CSS, but it turns out there is a qualifier you can add to CSS that forces modern web browsers to use the CSS styles preferentially, even for embedded styles.

That qualifier is “!important”.

Now I can beautify my historical blog posts by adding the following to my blog theme’s style.css:

/* Windows Live Writer - Code Snippet - Fix for emitted embedded styles */
#codeSnippet {
  background-color: aliceblue !important;
  font-family: "Droid Sans Mono", Consolas, courier, monospace !important;
}

Awesome.

References

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