wayne on April 20, 2008
I've made some changes to WayneJohn.com recently. The site was hosted at DiscountASP.net and I wanted to shut down hosting in favor of hosting it on my own servers, now that I have one available. Not only will this save me some money, but it's also an opportunity to change things up a little.
I also wanted to get away from DotNetNuke as my core engine for the site. After some checking around, it came down to either Graffiti or BlogEngine.net. After playing around with Graffiti, while nice and all, I felt the simplicity and the basic needs I have were covered best by BlogEngine. I really don't have much need beyond a blog engine, and BlogEngine.net covers all the basic needs in a way that seems intuitive to how I've been developing, so mods should be relatively easy.
In any case, the transition involved:
- Taking control of the DNS. My new server is running DNS, so I've decided to become the primary nameserver for my domains. So I established all the A records and such.
- Setting up the BlogEngine web site in IIS and local testing.
- Transitioning blog entries off AskWayne.net into BlogEngine.
- Changed nameservers on domain host to my nameservers
- Waited for the change to propagate enough to get in to the new site and test it out.
Things left to do:
- Transfer domain registration to my host, just for organizational reasons.
- Change DNS entries to route mail A records to new mail server
- Update Outlook mail settings
- Modify each and every post due to my own misconception on how to use categories correctly. Sigh.
I'm already screwing around with the themes a bit, so perhaps I'll have a couple themes to offer up in the near future.
Note to self: Next time you want to transition DNS entries from one server to another, make sure people are not on their way over to your house for a tattoo party. It's hard to entertain guests in between being paged from the site being down and your monitoring software pinging you off the hook...it all worked out in the end though.
