Redirecting old URLs to their new counterparts is an important part of restructuring an existing web site or migrating it to a new engine. In a previous blog post I've already described, how I kept all permalinks working after the migration. I didn't want to create full rewrite maps for redirecting month and date pages; creating a more generic rule made much more sense in this case.
After successfully migrating the content from the old DasBlog site to the new DocPad based one, it was time to generate permanent redirects of old URLs to new ones. Since the site is going to be hosted in Azure, I decided to use the URL Rewrite module - rewrite maps to be exact; because I need to map a large number of individual URLs, which can't be covered by a generic rule.
One of the most daunting parts of replacing my current blogging platform DasBlog by a site created with DocPad, is the migration of existing content. Being a software developer, I wanted to automate as much of the process as possible. Even if the total time required wouldn't be all that much shorter, I'd rather spend it writing scripts and learning new tools and technologies, than doing mundane tasks.
DasBlog allows extensibility through macros. Documentation doesn't mention their development at all. Blog posts are probably the best source of information available on it.
While IIS 6 in Windows 2003 prevents the download of files with unknown extensions by default, IIS 5.1 in Windows XP allows downloading such files. This might be something you want to prevent.
It's been almost three years since I last updated my web page and it's really about time to change that. I decided to use an existing solution for content management. I chose dasBlog since this site is about to become a sort of technology oriented blog. The most important thing is that I'll try to keep the updates more regular.