The downtime this weekend was due to an unfortunate failure in communications. Even more unfortunately the problem coincided with me being away for three days, so I didn’t even notice it myself until just recently.

I’m back now, anyway.

No, we haven’t lost our internet connection again. I’m just too busy to post. With Ingrid’s nursery start, the aftereffects of the house move, the build-up of stuff to do after our vacation, the need to buy the next size & season’s worth of clothes and shoes for Ingrid, I’m swamped. The nursery start is the biggest culprit: for a week both Eric and I were working, but Ingrid was only at nursery for 5 hours or so, which left me trying to squeeze a full day’s worth of work into 4, and Eric working late nights. I’ve got just enough energy to keep all of us fed and clothed, and the dishes and laundry done, but have got little energy or time left for blogging. It doesn’t help that Ingrid is sleeping like crap just now.

Back soon, hopefully.

Sorry for the silence. Our modem died in a thunderstorm last Thursday and we have been Internetless since then. A new modem will hopefully arrive in the post soon.

I’m going to Estonia for 2 weeks. Posting will be light.

Enjoy the remainder of your summer (or winter, if you’re on the other side of the Earth).

We now have Internet access again, so I’ve posted all the queued-up things I’d written in the meantime, and dated them as I originally wrote them. Happy reading.

(This is my last post about the Wordpress migration, I promise!)

I liked Wordpress better than Movable Type as soon as I’d installed it, and my opinion hasn’t changed. If you’re using MT and haven’t tried WP, do try it out!

The only advantage of MT that I have noticed thus far is that it is possible to manage several blogs via one control panel. But on the other hand most settings and templates are blog-specific anyway, so I’m not sure how much time that actually saves (apart from software upgrades).

Just about every part of WP is more user-friendly than the MT equivalent. The control panel is better designed and easier to navigate. The templates are more transparent and much easier to work with. Instead of MT’s strange tags (of which there are two flavours and I could never remember what the difference was) WP uses normal php functions.

Wordpress is also more feature-rich and more flexible. I can create static pages in addition to blog posts, add a list of links, easily switch between themes, add direct “edit this” links to individual posts, etc. And from a developer point of view, the WP functions give me more control with less work (mostly because they have many more parameters) than the MT tags.

Wordpress makes tinkering a lot more convenient because pages are served dynamically. MT on the other hand pre-builds and saves all pages, so each template change leads to a full rebuild of all the affected pages. With 600+ blog posts, the rebuild caused by a change to the main template takes long enough to make me really reluctant to change things. (And there is no option to rebuild just one post as a test case.)

The documentation for WP is an order of magnitude better than that for MT. Compare: the MTCategories tag vs the wp_list_categories function.

My initial plan was to use an existing theme for this blog, perhaps only changing a few fonts and colours. I browsed a bunch of themes, downloaded half a dozen, and tried them out. When I had picked the few that seemed most promising, I took a look at the code of each one to see which one would be easiest to modify. The Wordpress template structure turned out to be so clear and transparent and the documentation so helpful that I ended up writing my own theme, using the existing themes only as a source of ideas and to get an idea of what functions were available. And I did this when I had no experience of Wordpress, whereas I never got comfortable enough with MT to write a theme from scratch, even after having used it for over two years.

So I got a nice exercise in web design, learning PHP and CSS, both of which I’d touched before but not really used much. Now I can write passable PHP code and do some pretty nifty things with CSS. Hmm, perhaps I could find a way to squeeze in some javascript here, too?

I also had the pleasure to use the Firefox Web Developer extension. A very nice tool, so good that it’s worth downloading Firefox just to get that extension.

I have now fixed the last remaining functional issues with the migration to Wordpress and decommissioned the old Movable Type blog. Unfortunately this led to some duplicates in the RSS feeds, but that should be a one-time issue. Almost everything else should work, including 99% of any links that you may have to pages from the old blog. Let me know if you run across anything that’s broken.

Day 1 of Wordpress yielded 15 spam comments, about the usual topics. I’d actually forgotten about spam comments – the TinyTuring plugin for MT worked perfectly. I’ve enabled Akismet for now but I liked TinyTuring better, because it completely freed me from all comment moderation. No false positives, no false negatives, no work. I’m definitely going to have to find or write something similar for Wordpress.

If you’ve visited the site within the past day, you’ll have noticed that it’s got a shiny new look. That’s the Wordpress migration done!

“Mostly done” would be a more accurate description. Some things are broken, and I’ll be working on fixing those. Known problems include:

• No RSS feed
• Broken permalinks for categories and for some posts
• No header (that line of black text up there is just depressingly black)

While this new version is still in progress, the old one is running in parallel, and that includes the existing RSS feeds. In fact I am still posting new posts to the old blog, and then copying them over into the new blog, just to get them into the RSS feed.

Apart from the RSS feed, all the features of the old blog are present in the new one. The orange colour scheme is still here; links should work and images should appear; there’s a list of recent comments and a list of most popular posts, as well as a link to my photo gallery. The only thing that has disappeared is the full archive of all posts – I didn’t find that page very interesting or useful.

I am (slowly) working on migrating this blog from Movable Type to Wordpress. Whenever I hear the two mentioned in the same sentence, it’s always to say how much better Wordpress is. I’ve only just installed it, but already I agree.

I don’t expect any major changes to the structure or layout. But if there are any improvements you would like to see here, now would be a good time to let me know, so I can try to do those at the same time. Is some part hard to navigate, difficult to find, hard to read, or just plain ugly? Leave a comment here or send me an email.

PS: To be fair to Wordpress, migrating the blog content took a few minutes, so that’s not what is taking time. The hard part will be to find and customise a suitable theme, and to reimplement the various tweaks I’ve made to the MT templates.