I totally hate doing this… but I guess this is the way it’s meant to be 🙂

I’m moving my blog from its current home on MSN (nee Windows Live) Spaces to its new home on my own server at blog.umeshunni.com. It took a bit of work over the past couple of weekends, but I’ve finally got it up and running with the latest build of Community Server (CS 2.1) with a bunch of customizations thrown in.

I was wondering what to do about all the existing posts I had on the Spaces blog… should I just let them die? Should I user Community Server’s blog mirroring feature to move everything over? Should I write some code to move them over?

I didn’t want to let them die because I had some good stuff in there and I’d hate for all that stuff to just disappear into the sands tubes of the internet never to be seen again.

Blog mirroring seemed simple enough but I knew I wanted to tweak some of the older posts to take advantage of the more liberal formatting options I had with CS.

It’s too late at night to write new code and again, I wanted some flexibility with what was going into the new blog.

Soo…. I fired up Word 2007, set up my Windows Live Space and my Community Server blog as my blog accounts and clicked on ‘Open existing’. This gave me a list of all the entries I had in the WL space. I clicked on each one, set the account to my CS blog and clicked on Publish as Draft. This published the entry into Community Server. Now all I had to do was to open the entry in the CS blog editor, make the required formatting and tag changes, set the old publish time and re-publish the entry.

A little more involved than blog mirroring or using the MetaWebLog API, but this way I had full control over each entry that was moved over and didn’t have to resort to copying HTML by hand.

Since CS doesn’t support publish-by-email, I guess I’ll be using Word for blogging from now on.