...And We're Back

After a few months of trying not very hard to convert this blog to Ray Camden's open source BlogCFC, I've decided to stick with TypePad. BlogCFC is a great example of open source ColdFusion, but it does require cfdirectory and cffile tags, which my Web host has disabled. Not only that, the Web host now requires a static IP in order to connect to my SQL Server using Enterprise Manager; otherwise, you have to do all database work using a lame Web interface.

The biggest challenge I saw in porting this blog to BlogCFC was to export the posts and then import them to the database. Typepad's text-export does not export posts in a structured format, but a friend wrote a Perl script to transform the plain text into XML, and I wrote a ColdFusion page to import that XML into the database.

So to find another Web host that supported cffile, cfdirectory, and Enterprise Manager connections but didn't charge $300/yr for hosting was tough. Since Typepad is pretty cheap, I'll be sticking with this platform for awhile.