Fun fact for today regarding this weblog: a full export from MovableType of every post and every comment results in a 12.7 Mb text file containing 3,117 posts and 8,178 comments and trackback pings.
Wow.
I now have a WordPress site up and running that has all of my old entries (up to, but not including, this one) that I’m starting to poke around with to see what I think. So far, it’s been an interesting experience. The installation was dead simple. Importing my MovableType archives took some work — the PHP script kept timing out on the 12.7 Mb file, so I ended up having to break it into chunks and import six months at a time. That was likely more of a reflection on my server and the huge amount of data I was feeding it than WordPress itself, though.
I have the Staticize plugin installed, and it does seem to be making a difference: the initial load of any particular page takes a few seconds, but then any subsequent loads are pretty zippy as it can pull from the cached file (as a test, I even have all comments and trackback pings displaying on my posts about losing my position at Microsoft, and the load times are still bearable).
The WordPress interface takes some getting used to after years of familiarity with the MovableType interface. It’s certainly useable, and I like a lot of the options that are available to me, I’m just not quite as fond of the overall user interface (however, part of that might just be my fondness for sans-serif fonts, as the WP UI uses all serif fonts — to my eye, it feels more cluttered). Still, it’s the functionality that’s the key point, and it doesn’t look like I’ll have any worries there.
I’m not putting the WordPress blog live just yet (though, to be honest, if you’re really curious, it shouldn’t take too much guessing to figure out the URL), as I haven’t done anything in the way of customization just yet. At minimum, I want to make sure that my blogroll is set up and most (if not all) of the goodies in my sidebar are active. Diving into the design may end up taking a little longer — right now it’s using the default Kubrick theme, and while I’d prefer to move the current ‘distressed’ look and feel of this site over, I’m going to have a lot of relearning to do as years of familiarity with MovableType tags and design techniques battles with figuring out the WordPress tags and design techniques.
It’s a promising start, though I’ll freely admit that the real test won’t come until I bring the site live and find out just how my server reacts. I don’t know exactly when I’ll do that — part of me wants to just throw it in (sink or swim!), another part of me wants to make sure it’s perfect before I switch over, another part of me is still waffling over moving away from Movable Type, and yet another part of me thinks that I should concentrate on what I need to do to split the existing Movable Type database apart for Dad and Kirsten’s sites.
First steps are being taken, though. We’ll find out what path they lead me on.
“Wise Up! Sucker” by Pop Will Eat Itself from the album This is the Day…This is the Hour…This is This! (1989, 3:15).