In the middle of this week I migrated my blog from Movable Type to WordPress. The migration was not as easy as I would have hoped for and I had to tweak a lot of stuff to make sure that it all went well.
Firstly the reason for my move. If you remember, in the past I had commented about how all WordPress blogs look the same. Two of my favorite bloggers were mentioned and they duly showed their dissent, here and here. And of course I run my other blog Parsi Khabar on WP from the get go.
The move from Movable Type was forced by economics. A few entries of mine got “Dugg” and “Farked” and that brought around a huge surge in traffic. Infact so huge that my site hogged about 99% of the resources on the shared server at Lunarpages. For those who know how shared servers work, you realize that its a complete no no. General resource usage is supposed to be in 1-3% range. Around the same time I had a massive trackback spam attack and the cgi script all but went bananas.
Lunarpages gave me two options. Either upgrade to a dedicated server at about $ 99 a month, or move to WP which they install and support. I chose the latter. I blog as a hobby and therefore cannot afford or sustain the cost of a dedicated server.
Therefore the choice of moving platforms was not one of choice per se.
I still feel that Movable Type offers a lot more flexibility in design. I remember reading on some discussion forum that Movable Type was designed by designers and WordPress by techies. And so in that regard WP is solid strong on the tech front with great spam filtering etc. But very difficult to completely customise. Unless you are a hard core PHP coder.
The real challenge was to set up my new blog such that all my permalinks from the older blog would work in the newer one. I also did not want to move my blog to another directory and loose my Google Page Rank and TTLB rating and Technorati Tags etc.
Thus WP was coaxed into accepting permalinks in a customized fashion and I daresay that it works seamlessly. This is from the few preliminary tests I have done. Of course I will monitor my logs for 404 errors and keep on tweaking in the near future.
I will miss Movable Type. I wish I did not have to make the change. But then so is life. You sometimes need to make hard choices and get on.
Spam filtering was a big plus and did influence my decision to use WP instead of MT. And of course, the fact that it is free and well supported by a host of plugins and more than helpful techies.
Anyway, this blog does look cool now. Honestly, I prefer it from the older version which even if it looked different, I didn’t like.
WP blogs do look similar… Specially the new lay out which is being adopted by one and all makes me ‘so not like it’. Blogs are about content more than the lay outs but we all would like a cool lay out.
I am still searching for a simple yet cool lay out for WP and will stick to Kurbrick till then or forever.
Awesome! Your blog ROCKS! Man… If I was you I would be proud, so you should! Laterz dude….