Migrating away from Blogger.com

I’ve been underground since the beginning of the month and haven’t been working on any new posts. I have several new topics in the pipeline but I’ve been focusing on two projects that are keeping me away from my blog at the moment.

The first is digging into Silverlight. My employer has been getting requests for developers with Silverlight experience and so I’ve been working on digging in a bit more so I’m ready when I need it. I’m using my work on my project YouthSportsFan.com to give me something real-world to cut my teeth on and I’ll have some interesting posts that will come out of it. One is something I’ve already touched on lightly – design-time databinding. Also, I’ve been playing with custom templates and using them to improve the UI for a couple of the Silverlight Toolkit controls. I’m excited about both those upcoming posts.

The second thing I’ve been working on is indirectly related to my work on Silverlight. A colleague of mine has been very vocal (including bugging me in comments here on my blog) about getting me to switch away from Blogger.com. This got me thinking about how nice it would be to host running Silverlight samples in my blog posts instead of just the code snippets I usually post. So I’ve purchased my own domain developmentalmadness.com and it’s currently hosted on GoDaddy. I’ve downloaded Subtext as a blog engine and I’m customizing it at the moment.

My most important goal is that the links I’ve worked hard to get posted around the web will continue to work. I’ve put a lot of work into promoting my blog this year and I don’t want any of the links placed by myself or my readers to break. So far, Subtext has been brilliant in allowing me to tweak a few web.config settings which will allow me to respond to the requests I expect to be forwarded by Blogger.com when I switch to a custom domain. I’m excited about this and I will post a follow up when I’ve completed this so others can make the switch as well.