After some consideration, I decided to move the blog to a new location. http://cs.emeraldhand.com/blogs/WormInLiquidMaze/ is a new place to look for me. I created a new blog at the old location that informs visitors of the new URL. Plus, in the past I’ve shifted to using FeedBurner to host the feed, so anybody reading me through it should not notice any changes.

The main reason for the move is to get around behavior browsers are showing sometimes when they decided that underscore ( _ ) looks cutter and fuzzier encoded in a hexadecimal number. No, really, why else would they encode it?

Like everything in life, it took longer to do what I wanted than I expected and in then I found a simple way to do it. I don’t want other CS users, who realize that default replacement of white spaces with underscore upon blog creation is not the best way to generate the link, waste their time so I’ll describe simple procedure to change the blog location.

1. Ensure system account on which ASP.NET is running has modify permission on the cs/blogs directory. In case you’re wondering by default ASP.NET is running under ASPNET account in Windows XP and under Network Service in Windows 2003. If for some reason, you can’t give the required permission to ASP.NET and you have folders with the same name as your blog created in cs/blogs folder you should change the name of the folder manually to the new location where you want the blog to reside.
2. Go to the blog administration and at the bottom of the screen where it says “Blog name” enter a new name to be used as a URL for the blog location.
3. This is where it gets tricky. ASP.NET application must now be restarted. To do it the easiest way copy web.config file from remote host to your computer and back, effectively overwriting web.config with it’s copy. This should get ASP.NET to notice that the file was changed and it will restart the application.
4. Update all external links under your control to point to a new location.
5. Laugh at people who are trying to use the old link to find your blog.
   - OR –
   If you’re really nice, create a new blog at the old location to inform them of the change. Even people subscribed to the old feed should notice a post on the new blog informing them to update their link.

If you have any comments, question or if you have some idea how to redirect browsers directly to the new blog location from the old without the hassle of a second blog let me know.