I kept this blog running on the .Text 0.95 for far too long. I needed to patch the thing couple of times myself and to add a thing or two (CAPTCHA) just to keep it running. Plus, it was the only ASP.NET 1.1 application on the machine so it had to go

For a long time I contemplated about switching to the Community Server. It’s a commercial product but at the same time Open Source and free as in beer. Since I like to customize my blog engine with a bit of code it is important to have source. It’s also important that the engine can import my existing .Text database.

While an importer exists for older versions of Community Server (CS) , there is another problem – I need just the blog engine, not the forum, file and picture gallery and whatnot. CS is big and complicated, I need something simpler.

I’ve had Subtext on my radar for quite some time. It stagnated a bit a after it was announced but really picked up the pace from the middle of 2006. It’s a direct descendant of the .Text codebase and can import your database in a couple of seconds. At least for me, the upgrade was flawless.

If you’re thinking about upgrading, my advice is just go for it. You’ll get actively maintained product that you can submit patches to. There are several nice skins and building a new one shouldn’t be much harder than it was for the .Text.

(Edit) Things are not as smooth as I expected. Posting from BlogJet has been slightly problematic. I’m not sure if I should stick with the .Text as the type of my blog or should I move to the MetaWeblog API. I can’t get categories for my previous nor set the category for this post. The categories are imported correctly though, including all of the old posts’ categories.