Goodbye Blogger
Posted at 3:21 pm on Saturday, April 19, 2008, in Uncategorized, and tagged blogger, site.
Well, this was abrupt, even for me. This past week, as I have been catching up with a lot of the side-projects I have found myself involved in, I had made the determination that I would convert this blog from Blogger to Movable Type in July. Why July? This July will mark the fifth full year of blogging on Blogger, and I figured that would be a good time to make the next step, to make the leap.
I currently have three instances of Movable Type installed on my servers. The main one operates most of my websites (including the back-end of reyonthehill, and that will continue to be the case because of limitations of WordPress). The second exclusively makes up my archive. This was previously part of the main installation, but the archive has become too large that it needs its own instance. And the last is for my secret project, which I cannot discuss further because, as I said, it is a secret.
It was my full intention to meet that schedule — July 2008 — for the complete transition from Blogger to Movable Type, and in doing so, have all of my websites operating within the Movable Type publishing system. But last night I downloaded and installed WordPress, imported my posts and comments from Blogger, and published. No more Blogger. As I have stated, it was quite drastic, a decision and execution that happened in a little over an hour.
Blogger obviously has its shortcomings, mainly control of the output. Permalinks are impossible to change, you cannot create pages (enter Movable Type), and the lack of categories and the inadequacy of “labels” was frustrating. But moving from Blogger to Movable Type was not going to be that easy. The main issue was the theme and format. Movable Type is very limiting in that fashion, from a starting point perspective. Additionally, support is lacking, and a lot of plug-ins that are essentially required cost money. Over time, I still believe that Movable Type is the solution, and I will still use it for this blog, as I mentioned, but from the get-off-the-ground-and-running vantage, WordPress is a great solution.
WordPress has limitations as well. WordPress does not publish, but masks webpages behind custom URLs. Everything remains in the database, unlike Movable Type, which publishes static (or dynamic) html pages on your server. The up-side of WordPress is all changes are instantaneous. If I alter my archive directory, I do not have to republish the site to see those changes. (Of course, this would be a silly move to make, literally making all of the blog’s permalinks obsolete.)
The chief limitation of WordPress is pages. I am not able to publish a terminal page, but only index pages. For example, I can publish my A’s Superfan Network podcast to reyonthehill.com/podcast/superfan but not reyonthehill.com/podcast/superfan.html. What is the difference? Not much on the server side (since the pages do not exist anyway), but from a site-building perspective, it is frustrating that I need to make more and more false folders, and I cannot take advantage of terminal pages. A second issue with WordPress pages is that if the directory already exists, I cannot mask that directory. This is the reason my podcast directory is currently “located” at reyonthehill.com/podcast2. That drives me crazy, and I hope it will only be temporary as I re-organize the site.
I am happy I have made this change. It was time to grow-up and actually do something about it. I had been debating myself about the fact that I have Movable Type operating my other sites (as well as publishing the back-end of this blog), while using WordPress for content publishing. And I have concluded that that is alright, that this project — this blog — is big enough to be considered a stand-alone project. And that makes sense. So, goodbye Blogger, hello WordPress, please don’t break my heart, you realize that I have a back-up plan if you do.
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