(Update June 22, 2010: I've released a tool, Blogger2BlogML, that converts Blogger's ATOM export file to BlogML. I ended up doing this because of problems with comments when I migrated this blog — I had to fix these up manually which was painful. I'm now working on some larger blogs where this would be impossible…)

In January I got an email from Blogger announcing that they're killing FTP support. Apparently only 0.5% of Blogger blogs are published using FTP and it's a huge pain to support, mainly because many hosting providers restrict FTP access to certain IP addresses and if the Google servers running Blogger that moment aren't listed it's technical support time. 

Fair enough, but a bit painful for me as I have five blogs running on top of Blogger. I need FTP publishing as the templates I use end up running as ASP or ASP.NET pages. I Thought He Came With You is the first to move - if you're reading this post then it's up and running on BlogEngine.NET. This is an open source ASP.NET blogging platform. If it works out for this blog over the next month I'll start migrating the others. 

Getting up and running with BlogEngine.NET is easy enough - download the latest release and follow the getting started guide. I added the default install to a new Visual Studio web site project and was able to run it fine in the development server, no need to configure IIS. 

The challenge was moving posts and comments from Blogger into BlogEngine.NET. BlogEngine.NET happily imports and exports BlogML, Blogger spits out it's own Atom export format. 

Luckily Aaron Lerch has knocked up a PowerShell script to export Blogger to BlogML. This takes your Blogger ID as a parameter and exports all the blogs associated with that ID. You can just pull the <blog> element you need out of the export if necessary. If you use this tool follow the syntax closely from the example on the post. If you're new to PowerShell run this as administrator to start with and enter "Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned" to give permission to run the script. Then exit and run a non-admin instance of PowerShell to run the script.

After getting the export BlogEngine.NET refused to import it. I kept getting an invalid username or password error from the BlogML importer. Digging into the code a bit I found that a crash was occurring in api/BlogImporter.asmx when a blank category was passed to AddCategories(). I patched this function to skip blank/null categories and was then able to import successfully. I added a bug report for the problem so please vote for it if you hit the same issue.

The blog was in pretty good shape after the import. Categories were lost so I had to create them again in BlogEngine.NET and then apply them to each post. I also found that the date for comments had been set to the date they were imported. This can be fixed by editing each post directly (the files in App_Data\posts). I fixed the timestamps and also added back the URL for each comment where I had one from Blogger. I also edited my own comments to match my new BlogEngine.NET account so they got decorated as "by the author".

At this point the blog was good to go, but using the default template.

I've now whipped up a new template to match the old blog - I was pleasantly surprised by how easy this was to do. At this point I Thought He Came With You is going live on BlogEngine.NET. 

Almost everything is working at this point. I had a couple of user controls I need to move over - one shows the number of people who haven't visited the blog, the other figures out the most popular posts using the Google Analytics API. I'll see if I can implement at least the latter as a Widget so that other people can use it - watch this space (Update - now available here). 

Overall, I'm impressed. I resisted the urge to just write my own blogging platform which is a testament to how easy it is to both get BlogEngine.NET running and to customize the look and feel. Now I just need to work up the enthusiasm to do the same for my remaining four Blogger based blogs...

I've just released v1.10 of my ESRI Shapefile Reader (Catfood.Shapefile.dll). This is a .NET 2.0 forward only parser for reading shapefile content.

Sharon Tickell was kind enough to report two bugs with suggested updates. These have both been fixed in 1.10.

While working on these fixes I also discovered that there are no 64-bit Jet drivers (since releasing the first version I've upgraded to a 64-bit box for development). This is an easy fix, just target any application using Catfood.Shapefile.dll at x86. I've updated the demo application accordingly.

Download Catfood.Shapefile.dll from GitHub.

Does Facebook now hate MMS? For the past couple of weeks every time I tried to send a photo I got the following error message:

You have uploaded from an unrecognized address. For instructions on how to upload photos to Facebook, go to http://www.facebook.com/mobile"

I got this sending to both [email protected] and 32665. The referenced page is no help at all, and my phone number is registered with Facebook Mobile.

It turns out that there's a new secret email address. On the Facebook site click the icon to share a photo:

Then click Upload a Photo:

Then click upload via email:

Your personal email address is finally revealed and can be used to send a photo via MMS.

Facebook - update your error message to point this out!

The Ambient Orb is an LED illuminated globe designed to display subtle information - stock market prices, weather, etc. Normally the Orb is controlled via the pager network but you can buy (or build) a developer module and connect the Orb via your serial port.



I've used my Orb via both pager and serial port for a number of applications. I've just released a library - Ambient Orb Controller - on GitHub that supports both methods of control. I wrote the library to make it easier for me to gin up new Orb applications. If you use an Orb let me know what you come up with. Two of my favorites are using the Orb for continuous integration and as a music visualizer.

Now here's a niche:

I'm occasionally jealous of an iPhone app, in this case a station finder for NPR. I hate hunting on a long drive or in a strange city. Luckily, NPR has an API, so I've whipped up an NPR Station Finder for Windows Mobile.

I was a micro-ISV (µISV) for years before I heard of the term. It was coined by Eric Sink to describe a one man software shop, and is now generally used for any small software company.

There isn't much market data available this far down the long tail so I've spent some time analyzing PAD files to see if I could answer a few questions.

PAD is the Portable Application Description specification from the Association of Shareware Professionals. It's used to describe software for submission to download sites. How useful these sites are is another question — read Scott Kane on this if you haven't already.

I spidered all the PAD files listed in the ASP directory, downloading data on 76,066 products from 39,861 µISVs (companies / people / publishers). It's not a perfect data set as there are PADs that aren't software and µISVs that don't use PAD. I've also heard that some people are developing web apps these days. But here goes…

Where are the µISVs?

Overwhelmingly in the US. Other countries with more than a thousand listed are the UK, Russia, China, India, Canada, Germany and Australia (in descending order). Most countries have at least one µISV but the numbers fall off pretty quickly.

How much do µISVs charge for their products?

$29.95.

About a third of products are free and a third fall into 9 price points (all ending in 5). I found over a thousand different US Dollar price points overall.

The most expensive product was a $150,000 Green Living site license from South Beach Software (an order of magnitude more expensive than the runner up).

How large are µISVs products?

There's not much action past 20 MB. Most downloads are between 1-2 MB. There's an interesting little spike around 14 MB. I guess this is a popular framework, possibly Java? The largest download was almost 1.5 GB.

Are µISVs still releasing downloadable software?

This is a tough one to get at because PAD files just tell you about the most recent version, not the release history. The chart really shows a last update distribution for the products in the PAD catalog.

There's a large number of products last updated in mid-2008 with nothing comparable in 2009. Could this be a drop-off in PAD usage? A shift to web apps? Maybe final releases before the recession hit leading to less spare cycles for side projects (my µISV certainly pays for beers rather than mortgages).

How many products do µISVs publish?

This final chart shows that most µISVs have just one product. Of course in some cases there might be a brand per product and still a single entity — it's impossible to separate this out from the PAD data. The largest number of products from a single µISV is 616.

I've been busy updating a couple of Catfood products.

Catfood Earth updates your desktop wallpaper to show day, night and cloud cover. It can also display earthquakes, time zones, places and US weather radar:

Catfood Follower is a Twitter tool that automatically follows people who follow you and/or removes friends who stop following you. I think it's most useful for business accounts:

With these two out the door my next project is overhauling the Catfood website. I'm kind of dreading it, but the current architecture is over six years old and it's definitely showing its age.

I've just released a .NET library for parsing ESRI shapefiles - see ESRI Shapefile Reader on Codeplex. The library and source code are available under the Microsoft Public License.

A Shapefile is actually at least three files: a main file containing shape data (*.shp), an index file for locating shape records in the main file (*.shx) and a database of metadata for each shape (*.dbf) in dBASE format.

I ended up writing the library in order to convert Eric Muller's time zone shapefile into a format I could use with Catfood Earth. I found other libraries that could read shape data but not metadata, or provided a very thin .NET wrapper on top of unmanaged code and so I decided that a fully managed library could be useful.

The library - Catfood.Shapefile.dll - provides read-only, forward-only access to shapes and shape metadata. Currently all 2D shapes are supported: Null, Point, MultiPoint, PolyLine and Polygon. I might add additional types in the future, or if you have a pressing need it would be easy to extend the library by looking at an existing shape subclass and the shapefile specification (PDF).

See the Codeplex project for sample code and documentation.