silentcorner

Due to recent changes in Movable Type’s licensing I made the choice to finally switch to another weblogging software. Don’t get me wrong, I think Movable Type is a decent package, but the way they rolled out the new licensing scheme leaves me with a taste of baiting… getting users to use all the features for free, then telling them they have to pay now.

So I made the choice to switch to an open source package WordPress. It’s not as polished as Movable Type, but it’s written entirely in PHP and generates pages on demand instead of requiring rebuilds, which in some cases might be a concern, but if you look in my lower right corner of the page, you’ll see it generates pretty fast and creates very little load. So far I’m pretty impressed with WordPress. I only expect to use this for blogging, so I don’t need a more elaborite CMS like TextPattern or ExpressionEngine, both of which look like decent packages for more elaborate dynamic sites (and two packages I considered as MT replacements), but neither are open source.

The move to WordPress from Movable Type was pretty smooth as well. It took me less than a day to import all of my MT entries and redo all of my CSS, partially thanks to resources noted at Carthik.net. There’s even good resources listed there for redirecting old MT archive requests to the new WP entries so you don’t lose valuable search engine presence.

At any rate, something new for me to play with. And hopefully something that will help renew my interest in blogging again, since I’ve been rather busy lately and not as keen on spending time putting up entries or for that matter, even reading anyone else’s blog. I still have a little cleanup to do, too. I didn’t have categories public before so I didn’t spend much time actually making sure posts got put into proper categories, so that will probably be cleaned up in the near future.