This is just a note to let you know that the blog may become inaccessible for a while this weekend. I have finally decided to migrate the blog from MovableType to WordPress. This will hopefully address a few problems:
1. It will hopefully get rid of a lot of the spambots that constantly (thousands of times per day) hit my commenting script.
2. It will hopefully resolve some of the issues people have trying to comment here.
3. It will let me get some newer features, as I’m running a pretty old version of MovableType and attempts to upgrade to newer versions have failed abysmally in the future.
4. I’ll be able to leave pingbacks on WordPress blogs I link to.
5. I’ve used WordPress and decided I just like it better. (Okay, not really a problem, but hey.)
I’ve been hesitant to do this, but I discovered there’s a new site out there called tp2wp.com that streamlines the migration process. And while it costs $50, I figure that resolving the above issue is worth it.
To support this, I will be disabling all comments and trackbacks on this blog in a few minutes (relative to this blog’s posting time) to “freeze” the database.
From your standpoint, the way this plays out should look like this:
1. You may see the blog as it currently is, but will be unable to comment.
2. You may then see nothing. Or a blank blog.
3. You will (hopefully) eventually see this blog, but with a different cosmetic appearance. Hopefully, there will be a brief post from me announcing that the migration was a complete success and it’s back to business as usual.
As an aside, I will be doing a full backup of the site’s static pages and other files (e.g. images). If something goes horribly wrong (or I just get frustrated before I work through the dozens of minor gotchas the migration site forgot to mention), I should be able to restore the MT version of this blog. In that case, rather than step #3 above, expect to see a blog post from me muttering and cussing.
At any rate, wish me luck and I’ll hopefully catch you on the flip side!