Corey Roth [MVP]

My blog site DotNetMafia.com has been around for quite a long time.  It started as a conversation at a bar by Kyle Kelin, the Dot Net Mafia's original purpose was to provide a site to rank and review recruiters known for being shady and lying to both candidates and clients.  That concept never took off but we decided to use the name sometime around 2008 to provide a blogging platform for a group of us including Kevin Williams, Tony Kilhoffer, James Ashley, Kyle Kelin, and Cory Robinson.  For a time, we had a nice active blogging platform and many of us participated.  With the exception of myself though, I was really the only one that kept blogging.  If you look back at DotNetMafia.com, you will see that I have content dating all the way back to December of 2004.  Before I really started blogging officially, I used to write small articles using a SharePoint 2003 announcements list for our small team of .NET developers at Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group.  We were making the transition from ASP.NET 1.1 to ASP.NET 2.0 and this is where I showed tips to my team.  It was simple but it worked.  Some of the posts are pretty cheesy and they don't really have any relevance any more but I've kept them around for nostalgia's sake.

After most of my team including myself left Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group at the end of 2005, I created my own lightweight content management system built in ASP.NET 2.0 running in the data center hosted by Isocentric Networks where I worked for a while.  Through their generosity, they came my VM running for years.  Later I migrated it to an Azure Virtual Machine.  I somehow exported my content from the SharePoint announcements list and imported it into a SQL database.  That worked well until the DotNetMafia concept came around.  DotNetMafia.com was based on Community Server by Telligent.   For a while it was the go-to solution for blogs in the technical community.  Honestly, I don't know how I was able to import the content into Community Server.  It's there though.  As you might remember though, they changed ownership and took the free product away and the community dropped them as fast as possible.  You don't see many sites running on it any longer.  About 6 years ago, I looked at trying to upgrade it to a newer version and it proved to be more trouble than it's worth.  

I've been trying to get off of Community Server for years.  The site isn't mobile friendly.  It's no longer supported and it's really starting to show its age.  With over 1000 posts, I have built up a lot of SEO over the years and that's hard to give up.  Ideally I wanted to bring in all of my content AND maintain the URLs.  That's just not going to happen and it doesn't need to.  The world was a lot different 10 years ago and the brand DotNetMafia needs to go.  Moving forward, I'll do all of my blogging from a WordPress site at coreyroth.com and eventually I'll figure out how to import my content.  There are very few resources on how to make this happen.  The content is in a SQL database.  If I can extract it out and possibly get it into an OPML format, I might be able to get my content imported.  In the meantime, I'll try to cross-post where I can, but DotNetMafia.com has a shelf-life like InfoPath.  We'll keep the VM hosting it around until I get tired of paying for it.

CoreyRoth.com doesn't have a lot of content yet, but it will. 

coreyroth.com