infobong.com

Paul at MediaGeek has migrated his blog from Movable Type to WordPress, which gets me to thinking I should migrate as well. I haven't been happy with the design of this site for quite a while, and, after helping people install WordPress, I've realized that it's a far better blogging platform than MT. I haven't updated the sidebar or fixed minor little problems for quite some time, thinking that I'll eventually get around to redoing the whole site. However, this blog has long been a diversion, rather than a project, and I frankly don't have time to start a new project. To get this blog where I want it, I need to do several things.

• Find a new hosting company. (My current host is so cheap, it's hard for me to sign up for more expensive plans.)
• Install WordPress. (This is much easier than Movable Type)
• Develop new site design. (I've come up with a few ideas in Photoshop, which were all quickly abandoned.)
• Create a WordPress template. (I'm not PHP-literate, so I find this part more difficult than working with MT)
• Migrate my existing blog over to WordPress.
• Fix any weirdnesses from the migration

Taken all together, this just seems daunting, particularly when I have plenty of schoolwork to do. It would be easier if I started from scratch, rather than migrating the existing blog. I've got over 700 entries posted over the last three years, and I'm reluctant to throw out this work. Although some of the early entries are pretty puerile, I often search the blog to find old entries or re-visit links.

But keeping the old stuff introduces problems. I worry about the number of dead links that would arise from the change in platform. There are ways around this through software, or I could do like Paul, and keep the old MT-generated HTML, but I would like to have all of the entries on the same system.

Perhaps I should plan on migrating over the winter holiday, when my time is a little less structured. This still seems like a lot of work.

Paul says, "Moveable Type was unfortunately also getting a little creaky for me in terms of problems with comment spam and trackback spam." I feel the same way. Keeping this blog clean of spam has become a round-the-clock job. I find myself cleaning spam in class, or waking up in the middle of the night to run MT-Blacklist. Because the scripts will keep posting spam until I blacklist them, If I don't check on my blog for several hours, I will have hundreds of spam comments and trackbacks to clean out. Since it's constant, I forget how much time I spent working on the blog, even if posts are only occassional. If moving to WordPress will reduce the amount of time I spend monitoring spam, it will be less work in the long run.