.Net Jonesie - Migrating a Blog using Dmitryr's ASP.Net Rss

Friday, March 03, 2006

Migrating a Blog using Dmitryr's ASP.Net Rss by Peter

My old Jonsie.net domain is due to expire sometime soon so I thought it was about time I saved the 1 or 2 interesting posts I made there. The old site uses .Text so I could easily grab the posts from the SQL DB, but I thought it would be more fun to use RSS. I remember Scott Guthry posting recently about the ASP.Net RSS Toolkit so I downloaded it to have a play.

First thing I tried was to RTFM but for some reason this word doc keeps exploding and taking Word with it. A quick copy and paste to a new document fixed that (Word's document recovery was less than helpful!). The 'manual' is a little sparse, but it gives enough pointers to get your started.

There are several ways you can access the RSS feed. I wanted to create a simple WinForms or Console app to do this job so I tried using the Rssdl.exe tool to create a strongly typed channel feed. Unfortunately our Nazi firewall got in the way and the RssToolkit doesn't know anything about firewalls. After a bit of a search around the code I found the source of the problem in RssDownloadManager.DownloadChannelDom(). It was using WebClient to make the call to DownloadData but without first configuring the proxy. So, I changed this to:

    1             // download the feed
    2             WebClient wc = new WebClient();
    3             wc.Proxy.Credentials = System.Net.CredentialCache.DefaultNetworkCredentials;
    4             byte[] feed = wc.DownloadData(url);
 
This is adequate for this UI application but for a more robust solution you may need to modify this to allow a user name, password and proxy string to be passed in somehow.  
 
So, now I executed the Rssdl.exe too to create the class. This created jonsie.cs for me.  I then created a simple console app to dump the title of all the items on the blog:
 

    1 using System;
    2 using System.Collections.Generic;
    3 using System.Text;
    4 
    5 using RssToolkit;
    6 
    7 namespace JonsieExtract
    8 {
    9   class Program
   10   {
   11     static void Main(string[] args)
   12     {
   13       jonsieChannel jc = jonsieChannel.LoadChannel();    
   14 
   15       foreach (jonsieItem ji in jc.Items)
   16       {
   17         Console.WriteLine(ji.Title);
   18       }
   19       Console.ReadLine();
   20 
   21     }
   22   }
   23 }
 
Which produced this:
 
 
Cool!  Oh, crap.  I only get the last 15 posts.  I need all of them.  Oh yeah, this is a setting in .Text.  So I log to my old site and .. hang on, where's the admin options?
 
 
IE 7 has problems displaying the tabs.  Fortunatly I have a spare machine with IE6.  I set the Default number of posts on the home page/feed to 115 and click save.  And wait.  And wait. And wait.  Bum.  Looks like .Text is as useful as ever.  Oh well, part 2 another day.

Friday, March 03, 2006 3:36:01 PM (New Zealand Daylight Time, UTC+13:00)

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