It’s a new year, decided it was about time to upgrade blogging software. I still remain fond of Blosxom and its chicken wire and duct tape sensibility (check out the old colophon). I continue to use it at work, but for this blog it was starting to feel a little long in the tooth. In blosxom, each entry is a file on disk. With the plethora of text manipulation tools available on Unix, this is great for hacking, especially compared to the database manipulation route for the SQL unsavvy. On the other hand, meta information about entries becomes a real pain to deal with: date stamps, tags, and comments associated with entries have to be either glommed onto the same file and parsed back out on the fly, or kept in separate files on disk from the entry. Neither approach is as straight forward as keeping it all together in one database entry.

There was also a lack of immediacy in the old way: editing a text file, uploading, finding typos, repeat. It’s okay if I’m sitting on the same machine as the web server, but for levork.org that’s not the case. Also, I’ve been using wikis a lot lately, and editing directly in a browser form is becoming natural despite the lack of emacs shortcuts I’ve grown used to. (Speaking of which, I hear they have these text editors now that allow you to see true formatting in real time. Whizzy-wig, I think they call them. How neat!)

I’ve set up Movable Type on this machine before, but I decided to try out Wordpress on another blog as a test. After getting past the MySQL setup hump, installation was a breeze, and I was impressed with the feature set compared to Movable Type. So I tried it here on levork.org: exported the RSS feed from blosxom after manipulating the story templates somewhat, removed the newlines from the resulting XML RSS file (I’m picky about word wrap), and imported that into Wordpress. Spent an evening fixing a bunch of intra-site links, correcting a bunch of unicode and HTML special characters mangled somewhere along the way, reintroducing newlines into preformatted text, wrote some mod_rewrite rules to preserve old links, and here we are: Wordpress and blosxom sitting in the same directory for now, with Wordpress handling most things. Right now the look is boring WordPress default, I’ll have to learn how to edit the themes along the way, and I have to figure out feeds, sitemaps, and other such things along the way.

And hey - you can comment now!