William Reardon’s Blog

What started off as a simple effort to change the look-and-feel of my blog has resultant in full-scale abandonment of Movable Type.

First off, it’s near impossible to find alternative templates for MT. Try it. Why? Well, for some God-only-knows reason, they decided to call them styles. Despite calling them “Templates” in their UI, in the Nav, and not making any mention to the fact that they might be called styles.

Ugh.

After making that discovering, I found out something else — I’d have to throw-out my customized templates. Annoying, but fine. I discard them only to fine, nope they won’t. I install the additional plugin needed. Still doesn’t work. Maybe cached style-sheets? Shift-reload. Nope. New browser, nope.

Ugh^2.

Jimmy, Rick, Craig all use Wordpress. Maybe I should give that a try. So I figure I’ll start the pain of that installation (and migration of my MT content) tomorrow.

I was a bit reluctant. WP is in PHP, and I hate PHP. But fuck it.

Here’s the funny bit: I spent about a quarter of the time getting WP full installed as I did futzing with MT. (And no, not because it was in PHP.) It seems the WP guys have just spent more time making things easier. MT, on the other hand, seems to have frozen in time. Not too surprising with Six Apart (creators of MT) spending most of their effort on Typepad etc.

Tweaking layouts seemed easier, and I was pleased with the number of anti-spam plugins. (This was a MAJOR headache for me until I hacked together the “type Chicago” solution.)

Anyway, I’ve tried to setup redirects where I can, including for my RSS feeds. If somethings broken or not working, just give me a hollar.

Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 24th, 2006 at 6:40 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.