Hello, denizens of the Interweb!
It’s been a long time (more than a month!) since I’ve posted, and this post isn’t going to try to cover all that; that’s what the next one will be for. Instead, I wanted to point out (for those of you who don’t look at my site, or those of you on feedreaders) that my layout has hugely changed; this is because I’ve switched from Wordpress, which I’ve always used, to Movable Type.
Why did I make the switch, one might fairly ask? Well, I’ve been bothered by Wordpress’ speed issues for a while now. They’re partly due to the fact that I use shared hosting, sure, but honestly, it was driving me crazy to have to wait 15 seconds for the front page of my blog to load, and over a minute for a post to finish being posted.
Secondly, I was actually convinced by Anil Dash’s very funny (and not a little informative) post, “A Wordpress 2.5 Upgrade Guide.” It went through the list of advantages of Movable Type, and showed how with the impending release of WP 2.5– the best choice was to leave WP entirely. Obviously it was somewhat tongue-in-cheek– but the WP community appears to have taken it as pure evil. Matt Mullenweg, a man who I thought would have made a rational and insightful riposte, instead replied in the blog comments with an ad hominem not related to the article– and that’s setting aside his Twitter response. With advocates like that– MT seemed like a more fun place to be.
So then, how was the actual changeover process?
Well, first, Movable Type’s import functionality leaves something to be desired. Having exported my blog in the WXR format as requested, I imported it into Movable Type– and found that MT lost all my tags, and all of my paragraph breaks, from all my previous blog posts. This isn’t good– they’re in the XML file (I checked), so this isn’t WP’s fault. I’ve gone through and restored the tags, but I haven’t gotten around to fixing formatting; it’s a much larger job.
Other than that, the changeover went quite well– and I’m pleased with the results. My blog loads much faster (due to the static generation in MT), but even the long-form publishing to make static pages (basically the slowest thing you can do; it has to recreate every part of the blog) is faster than it takes WP to push out one post. How great is that?
The administrative interface is much more responsive generally, too, allowing me to make the changes to add Analytics, for instance, much faster than WP can even show me where that code is.
My plugins are mostly unneeded with MT– OpenID support, for instance, is in the core. So “it just works,” not “it works as soon as I fight with it for a couple weeks,” which was my experience with OpenID on Wordpress. (Admittedly, that was partly because the original OpenID plugin for WP stopped maintenance, so I had to switch over to a new one.)
So we’ll see how this goes; if nothing else, I hope the new, slicker interface will encourage me to post a bit more often. :-)