bye bye movable type, hello wordpress

I’m trying to get ready for a big trip, so logically instead of packing, I decided to transition from Movable Type to Word Press (thanks to Chiang’s LOOP).

The actual export/import procedure was pretty easy. Unfortunately, I lost all my MT permalinks, so there are going to be a bunch of broken pages in Google’s search for a while. It would have been relatively easy to use .htaccess and Apache’s mod_rewrite, but somewhere along the way, MT got really confused and there is a big gap in the entry IDs. In other words, somewhere after entry 206, MT decided that the next entry should be numbered 300. This means that there is absolutely no logical way to map my old MT entries to my new WordPress entries. Another reason to move away from MT I suppose.

It took a while to find a WordPress theme that I liked. Currently, I’m using the Zen Minimalist theme, along with a bunch of modifications to make it look more like my old site, especially increasing the font size. Why do designers love small fonts so much? They look pretty, but I find them to be pretty unreadable.

In any case, what’s done is done, and I look forward to a spam-free blog from now on.

(ps, if MT hadn’t been screwed up, what I would have done to preserve the old permalinks would have been a combination of preserving the old permalinks with .htaccess and mod_rewrite along with this permalink redirect plugin)