10 years ago I switched this blog from Radio Userland to Movable Type. Looking back, it’s incredible how mature the software was at the time that it could last this long. I didn’t stay current with updates; the version I was running was ancient by any standard.
I’m planning some new blog-related experiments soon, so it was time to migrate to a new blogging app. While I still prefer static publishing, after evaluating a bunch of options I ended up going with WordPress. I don’t love it, but it has one feature that is more important than anything else: I’m fairly confident it will be around and well-supported 10 years from now. Rands recently made a similar choice.
I preserved every blog post URL from the previous version of the site so that links don’t break. This wasn’t trivial. For a time it had me lost into the darkness of writing WordPress plug-ins, which didn’t work anyway, before finally coming to my senses and writing a script to post-process all the Movable Type titles into custom slugs.
The RSS feed is also the same, but not the RSS item GUIDs. This means you’ll probably have a one-time “mark all as read” in your favorite news reader. Apologies, but it was either that or never ship the new site.
There’s a little bit of cleanup and design work still to do. The site already looks much better on mobile devices, though. I’m excited to get back into regular blogging.
