About the migration…
I mentioned earlier that I’d migrated this blog from Movable Type to Wordpress. I thought I should say some more about that. When I started my blog (way back in November 2003), Movable Type was the best and most popular blogging software around, by quite some way. It’s written in Perl, and mostly works by publishing static files. Then Movable Type started charging users, in varying degrees, and then Wordpress came along as an alternative, written in PHP mostly serving content dynamically.
As Wordpress is now probably the most popular blogging software, and lots of people have moved to it from Movable Type, so you’d think there would be loads of tools available to make the migration nice and easy, right? Well, mostly. The first issue I had was preserving the individual post URLs. For some reason, the standard Movable Type export feature doesn’t include the post ids, which are included in my post URLs. There are a few different solutions to this published, but I couldn’t get any of them to work (due I think to having slightly different versions of Movable Type and Wordpress), so in the end I resorted to a semi-manual solution using SQL. Urgh, that was a late night.
The next problem is that I haven’t yet copied across all the embedded images, photos and other assorted files. This ought to be a copy and paste job (or download/upload), but various boring factors make it a little more complicated. The long and short of it is that, currently, the old blog posts are text only. I’m going to fix this, but slowly, so bear with me.
There may be all sorts of other problems with the imported posts that I haven’t discovered yet (dodgy characters, bad formatting - I expect it all). I’ll fix them when I can.
That said, blogs are about looking forward, not back, right? So I’m not going to worry too much. The more important thing is to pick up the energy for blogging once again…
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