I’ve threatened to do it half a dozen times, and finally went for it. After fiddling for a while trying to fix a broken comments problem, decided maybe it was time to switch from Movable Type to WordPress. Playing with it more and more lately, and liking it more all the time (though it still lags behind in multi-user/multi-blog functionality, despite the beta existence of WordPress M-U).
Import process went pretty smoothly, after tweaking PHP’s max_execution_time and max_upload settings. But a lot is broken too – fonts on archive pages, polls, Image From Nowhere, random quotes, blogroll, image pop-ups… Jagged edges everywhere, and much finessing to do. But decided it’s OK to be naked in public sometimes, so will wrench in spare time over the next few weeks. A public experiment – pardon the dust.
Ironically, the MT blog was using a ported and hacked version of Aamukaste’s Neat theme. Now I’ve returned to the actual WP version of it and need to hack my MT mods back in.
More irony. My inability to comment about my use of Bloglines.com on Feed on Feeds triggered the notice to you that triggered the change. Now Birdhouse does not show up in Bloglines because http://blog.birdhouse.org/index.xml is no longer there. You may want to add a secondary legacy feed if you think a lot of people get to you via RSS. It is easy enough for me to fix w/ the RSS link I see below.
Ah – I had set up a redirect from one of the old RSS feeds (atom.xml) to the new, and have now set up a 2nd redirect from index.xml as well.
The new feed URL is http://blog.birdhouse.org/feed/atom/ (and is autodiscoverable) but no one should have to worry about it – they should all be working automatically now. Thanks for the kick.
Now I don’t see the full-text of each feed entry… using: http://blog.birdhouse.org/atom.xml
I don’t believe I *ever* had full-text RSS feeds… did I? If I did, it was an accident (I don’t believe in them). So… glad that’s been fixed! :)
The ibiblio have done a pretty snazzy looking multi-user/multi-blog rework of WordPress that they’re calling Lyceum. They just released it.
http://lyceum.ibiblio.org/about
Thanks Chris — Looks cool. In a way, I hate to see projects splinter like this, with what should be core functionality being bolted on by 3rd parties. WP should have licked this one long ago, before they got so popular / embedded. Here’s hoping this kind of functionality becomes part of the core development.
I’m using IE6 (I know.. I know) and your side bar has been pushed down below you posts. Not a big deal but thought I’d say something.
Thanks Les. Fine in Safari and Firefox (Mac and Win). As usual, bending over backwards to accomodate MSIE’s crapola CSS support.
I’ve got VirtualPC, will check it out now and try to find a fix.
Much tweaking to do still, but the sidebar is back in MSIE.
Les, can you tell me whether you can see the first frame of the Google video (a few posts down) in MSIE? I can’t in MSIE, but am not sure that’s not a side-effect of VirtualPC.
Scot, after my recent troubles when I stupidly switched to Yahoo (see my blog), I was just about set to finally do the right thing and move my MT blog to birdhouse.org. But now you’ve switched to WP, and so I’d be worried about birdhouse staying up to date with all the latest MT requirements. Do you have other customers on MT? Many of them?
Hi Frank – We have about five other users on MT, but each user has their own MT install. I don’t automatically upgrade every installation of every piece of software in every customer account unless their are important security issues. People are technically responsible for the software they run, but I do upgrades on customer request. I have on occassion installed anti-spam plugins and things for people gratis if there’s a chance it will help reduce server load.
But those issues aside, I’ve been recommending that all new Birdhouse bloggers use WP rather than MT for quite a while now. If you did move to Birdhouse, you would be free to stay on MT if you chose, but I would encourage you to make the jump. The data conversion and initial setup is easy, though things get more complex if you have a lot of custom functionality that needs to be reproduced.
Either way, we’d be stoked to have you on board!
Scot, nice work. I can see the sidebar and the first frame of the ‘quark’ video from What the bleep do we know.
welcome to the future, Scot!
Despite all the work it’s taking to get everything humming again, I do get to check one thing off my list that’s been back-burnered forever: Pagination of long archive pages. MT wants to put them all on one page no matter how many entries, whereas WP paginates them automatically. Neat-o.
And wow, the speed of posting comments on this blog compared to the old one is all the evidence you need of the slowness of CGI execution compared to PHP (although the issue is bigger than that – MT always has to rebuild at least two pages or more (homepage, category index, date index, and individual archive page) each time a comment is posted. Whereas WP rebuilds 0 (but of course has to essentially build a new page on each request).