This blog has been left untouched since it was created 5 years ago, but now, thanks to the push from Umbraco and their migration to a new cloud infrastructure I was forced to do a long-overdue upgrade.

Now, this blog is running on the latest and greatest Umbraco v8.17 and Articulate 4.3.

Migration was "interesting": I didn't want to just use the BlogML export and import for the fear of losing some information (like tags, cover images and most importantly changing URLs), so I started with the recommended migration path

• Umbraco 7.5 to 7.6 and Articulate 2 to 3
• Umbraco 7.6 to 7.15
• Umbraco 7.15 to 8.2 and Articulate 4
• to latest Umbraco

Unfortunately, being such an old version, every migration caused a lot of pain, with randomly disappearing DLLs and random assembly loading issues. But I eventually made it to run on the latest v7 and the latest version of Articulate supported on v7.

And then I tried migrating to v8. But I encountered very weird data migration issues. Some I managed to fix by running some SQL script manually, but others were too obscure and I didn't want to start up the Umbraco project and debug the migration code.

Eventually, I had to go via the BlogML route. This was also a bit painful, but by modifying the exported BlogML file, and enhancing it with some data I exported directly from the database, I managed to migrate all content, keeping all tags and URLs. The cover image of each post was "lost", but I decided I'll add them manually since only 20-30 posts have the cover image out of 800.

In the process, I've also discovered a few bugs in the Articulate BlogML export/import procedure and I'll try to send a PR during the End of Year holiday break.

If you browse around you might find some weird image rendering issues, or other similar errors: bear with me while I try to update the theme and the content to better match the features of the latest Articulate.