Welcome to my upgraded blog!

It has been more than two years that I blogged about anything. I have moved to Microsoft Global Delivery as an Information Security Consultant (SDL) in June 2014. It took almost two years for me to settle down, get used to the work culture, the technology stack and my new security consulting work. After two years all I can say is, I'm loving it!

Ghost FTW!

Meanwhile, I could not get time to even think about my blog or about maintaining it. Now that I am getting used to the work load, I thought of taking some time on a long weekend to revamp it. In a nutshell, these are the changes:

• I have moved from BlogEngine.Net to Ghost. I really loved BlogEngine and used it for almost 5 years, but started loving Ghost for its simplicity.
• I have hosted my blog on Azure - Installed NodeJs on Azure Web Apps. It is damn easy, as mentioned by Hanselman.
• I have pointed my domain (novogeek.com) to my website on Azure App Service. Here is how you can do it. You may have challenges configuring A-records in your domain registrar's control panel - raise a ticket and it should be smooth.

What happened to the good old blog posts?

Yeah, this is the painful point when you migrate across blogging platforms. Unfortunately, even in 2016 there is no easy way to migrate content across platforms. I admit I didn't explore the possibilities fully. I am too busy to spend time on this. Else I would have written a migration utility myself.

Thankfully, BlogEngine allows you to export your blog posts as BlogML (an XML format). The exported file which had 5+ years of blog posts was about 20 MB in size! Half the size was rotten with spam comments and I see no point in wasting my time to clean it up. I do not want to lose the content either, as I spent sleepless nights in learning and writing it. So I have created an archive site on Azure (free one), deployed BlogEngine on it and imported the BlogML file into it.

Here is my blog's archive: https://archive.novogeek.com/. This archive remains as my personal reference and as my sweet memoir. At this point, I am least concerned about SEO, broken references, serving mixed-content etc. With 100+ articles, the cost of cleanup (w.r.t time) is too much for me., so it is a conscious trade-off. When time permits I will convert the XML files to Markdown and merge it with this blog's posts, but that is least of my priorities.

Hoping to keep this blog active. Let's see!