November 18, 2005

Changing the Engine

Since 1999 this site has been run by Blogger. Administration was mainly trouble free. But lately blogger has been breaking down. More often than not over the last month or two I've had to publish posts multiple times in order to get them up on the web (the tool hangs at 50% or 75% etc and has occasionally been leaving me with no site at all). These problems seem to be getting worse and worse. This all goes against my "spend little or no time on administration" credo.

Google's buyout of blogger from pyra bought blogger enormous popularity and the popularity is the poison pill. Blogger's feature set has been stagnant for years and my guess is that most of new engineering is going into dealing with the massive numbers of new users. Blogger's limitations have always annoyed me.... little things like the lack of a simple way to include a "back" link to get to the previous post and lack of categories for posts.

For me the obvious solution is to switch to Moveable Type. I already have MT on my server (it is the engine that runs my photoblog), it's free, and it adds many of the features Blogger lacks. The only downside I see to migrating is that I will probably lose all the comments people have made over the years. It will take a day or two to make the switch, but in the end the site will return just as it was. I will try to maintain the url structure and keep everything in the same place (rss feeds and so on). So in a few days there should be a better more flexible site complete with search, categories, and a back button. Until then.

posted at 12:03 AM by raul

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