I've just finished migrating my home blog server to CS v1.1.

I spent much of the previous day performing a migration of my blog system from the venerable .Text v0.95 to CommunityServer v1.1.  There were a number of issues that turned what should have been a couple hours of work into a day of work.

You'll notice that I didn't adopt the v1.0 of the product when it came out, but rather waited for v1.1.  The reasons for this are:

1. CommunityServer supports and comes configured for multiple blogs on a single server, whereas .Text was a single blog.  There were difficulties in configuring CS to behave as a single blog server, which was what I needed.
2. There was no support at the time of release for a migration tool to take your .Text content and add it to your newly installed CS server.
3. It's a v1.0.

The first issue, the configuration as a single blog server, was resolved by a web-based configuration tool that provides detailed enough instructions on just how to configure CS v1.1 as a single blog server.

The second issue, the migration of .Text v0.95 to CS1.1 was resolved by this DotText-CS-Converter migration tool.  It's not perfect, there are a number of manual steps that you still need to perform that I think should have been built into the application itself, but you can't have everything.

The third issue...   1.1 > 1.0.  ;)

Related to the first issue, I've set up an alternative DNS entry dedicated for use by the blog.  So you'll now notice that the blog is hosted on http://blog.geeqs.net.  I've redirected requests going to the old blog to the new blog.

The migration and conversion took me 3 or 4 hours.  The setup as a single blog system took another hour.  I wanted to migrate my old .Text skin which was the "cogitation" skin to CS, but there is no skin migrator available.  As a result I had to spend another 4 or 5 hours customizing two of the packaged skins.  What you see in use now is a modification of the "PoisonIvy - air" skin. 

The modifications I made were to the CSS style sheets, which is my first serious use of CSS so far.  I've found it handy for "skinning" capabilities and very useful for maintaining a consistant style throughout a web page, but quite limiting in others.

I am a Defender-ship. I am fiercely protective of my friends and loved ones, and unforgiving of any who would hurt them. Speed and foresight are my strengths, at the cost of a little clumsiness. I'm most comfortable with a few friends, but sometimes particularly enjoy spending time in larger groups. What Video Game Character Are You?

Or...

I am a Thrust-ship. I am small and tricky - where you think I am, I probably am not. I can work very fast, but I tend to go about things in a round about way, which often leaves me effectively standing still. I hate rocks. Bloody rocks. What Video Game Character Are You?

I am nerdier than 96% of all people. Are you nerdier? Click here to find out!

I've been waiting for quite a while now for the upgrade to my available mailbox size @ hotmail, so once I found out that Outlook Express access to your hotmail account (originally announced in September) had been cut last week, that pretty much killed any reason I would have to use hotmail other than as a junkmail address.

Since then I'm glad to see that they've re-enabled Outlook Express access to Hotmail, as well as upgraded my account to 250MB.  It concerns me though that they haven't announced this... so it may just be temporary.

With the current functionality available for free from MSN services such as Hotmail (email), MSN Calendar (scheduling and alerts), MSNMessenger (instant messaging), and now MSN Spaces (Blog) and the single-sign-on integration with MSN Messenger/Passport, I think MS has a pretty rich set of community services.  This may be tough to beat.

I currently host my own blog (not so frequently updated these days) based on .Text (link to source project on GotDotNet)on my own servers because I wasn't happy with the other available hosted offerings available at the time.  So now I'm just checking out MSN spaces.