I’m currently in the process of migrating from self-hosted dasBlog to a self-hosted WordPress site. I did set up a WordPress.com hosted blog but decided I wasn’t ready to give up as much control as I have grown accustomed to. I won’t say it’s been easy and it’s certainly not been a famous 5 minute installation. Maybe if I were already running PHP and mySQL, but certainly not with a clean install of Server 2008 and IIS7. Which I guess is one of the big reasons I used dasBlog for so long. It was simple and didn’t even need a database. Sadly dasBlog just doesn’t have as much going on as for as community contributions, updates, plugins, support, you name it. I was going to give Community Server a go but after a couples days with it I realized it was overkill.

So yep, I’m now going to use Server 2008, IIS7, FastCGI with PHP, and mySQL. Hey, at least it’s not LAMP, doubt it will ever be unless I stop hosting.

I do have the blog running and it’s great. But I did hit a few snags and found a bunch of resources that really helped. If I do everything right it should end up being seamless. URL Rewritting should hopefully have permalinks working fine along with existing RSS feeds and all that junk. We’ll see. I’m finally getting around to dumping all my domains and moving everything to coreygo.com so feel free to head there now and subscribe there if you want.

Here’s the list of pages I used to get me going:

• Installing WordPress
  http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress
• Installing Multiple Blogs (just in case I need to)
  http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_Multiple_Blogs
  http://wordpress.org/support/topic/174688
• WordPress on IIS
  http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/280/wordpress-on-iis/
• Setting Up a Database for a PHP Application on IIS
  http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/300/setting-up-a-database-for-a-php-application-on-iis/
• Enabling Pretty Permalinks when hosting WordPress on IIS7
  http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/466/enabling-pretty-permalinks-in-wordpress/
• Using FastCGI to Host PHP Applications on IIS 7.0
  http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/246/using-fastcgi-to-host-php-applications-on-iis-70/
• Remember to set the PHP registry settings if you extract PHP from the ZIP
  http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/tutorials/windows2008-iis7-fastcgi-php.html

• Solved my 503 Service Unavailable issues by making sure to set this registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\PHP\IniFilePath = C:\PHP

Other than that normal troubleshooting and a lot more than 5 minutes. I also grabbed a bunch of plugins and a bunch of different themes to try out but that’s for another post. I am going to try the NextGen gallery plugin since it does EXIF and RSS but I need to make sure it’ll support just feeding it a directory of images for bulk additions. Oh and finally I need to update all my bloody categories since they’re lame. Plus finally 100 other things that I’m sure I’m forgetting.

That’s all for now, see you via WordPress shortly.