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July 5, 2006

Moving the type …

Yes, as some of you might have noticed already, I’m back to using MovableType 🙂 There is less server load, in certain ways it’s much more configurable and (as I keep saying) I do like their anti-spam options much more than I like the WordPress solutions. Sure, there are downsides. I can’t have dynamic stuff like calendars which show the current date :p But overall, I think this is a better solution to go with.

The changeover itself was fairly easy. It took me about a day to modify my old script for moving data from Movable Type to WordPress and to convert it to move data from WordPress to MovableType 🙂 The testing took a bit longer and I had to do some rewriting as I discovered issues. Somewhere along the way, I also found out about MovableType 3.3 beta and had to again adapt the script for the single relevant database change that I found there. I have put up the scripts here if anybody wants to use them.

Of course, once the data was transferred over safely from WordPress, I had to re-do the templates that I used on my site and the creation and tweaking of templates took about another day. Was I ready for posting after that? Oh, no :p I now had to test posting with Blog to see that I could post from my desktop to my new MT based blog using Blog. This resulted in further code changes. Not because Blog wouldn’t publish to MT but due to a curious problem which arose due to this particular set of circumstances.

Blog keeps track of what entries have been published to a remote server. I had already published the entries for my WordPress based blog. But the MT blog has different entry IDs than the WP blog did. So I couldn’t simply switch remote blogs. I could have wiped everything on the server and published all the entries from my desktop via Blog to generate new entry IDs but then I would have lost the comments on the server since Blog doesn’t track comments when publishing via XMLRPC (mostly because none of the APIs provide a way to download comments). So, I had to add new functionality to Blog which would allow me to synchronize existing entries with those on a remote server. Adding that functionality and testing it took some more time.

Now, I’m finally ready to post to the blog again using Blog :p So let’s see how this one goes …

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Posted by Fahim at 6:33 am  |  2 Comments

July 1, 2006

Vacillations of the vague kind

I am thinking of switching back to MovableType once again :p The reason? I am tired of dynamic pages and the headaches they bring with them 🙂 At one point in time, when I first switched to WordPress from MovableType, I was really happy with dynamic pages and all the nifty things they allow you to do. But as time has passed and I’ve come to consider load on the server, spidering by search engine robots etc., I’m beginning to think that perhaps static pages are a much better option.

For instance, I notice that the Google spiders are hitting my WP-Cache pages. Those pages are ephemeral – they will be there for an hour today but gone tomorrow. So why are the search spiders looking for old pages again and again. How much load does that put on the system?

Being in website hosting, I know how much load is put on the server by dynamic sites which depend on database queries. I don’t really want to put that kind of load on my host’s server. I know that I don’t actually put that kind of load on their server because I don’t have a really popular site. But what if the traffic to my site were to increase? I am not sure and I don’t know if I want to find out.

Of course, there are other reasons. I don’t like the pace at which WP development is going nor the direction they seem to be taking. There isn’t that much being done about combating spam for instance. The efforts are all in the form of plugins and none of them seem to be really effective.

So, I’ve been looking at MovableType. They do have the features I want from a blogging platform. The free personal version even allows multiple blogs – something that I’ve been complaining about in WordPress for a while now :p The only snag at the moment is that I hate MT’s import feature because it relies on a text file. All of the WP to MT migration scripts rely on MT’s clunky text-file based import. I think I might have to write a new script which simply transfers the content from one database to another and I should be set to start testing the new MT to see if I can work with it 🙂

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Posted by Fahim at 6:38 am  |  2 Comments

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