Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

If this blog is green, then you’ve made it to the fourth major revision of Speak Stiltedly etc., etc. Long, long ago on a server far, far away, my blog began in a wiki. It quickly moved to Blogger at Blogspot. In a minor change, I gave up Blogspot and started publishing to my webspace at Freeshell. Blogger was annoying, and after the umpteenth mangled post, I made the big switch and installed my own MovableType at Freeshell.

Next came a minor move to my lovely free host here at irth.net, where mine is just one of many blogs on their big blog server. And there’s the rub, for the sad news came out last week that MovableType will be charging the big bucks for MT 3.0 for all users running more than 3 blogs (upped to 5 this weekend) on their MT installations. You can follow the details on any geek blog - I’m way behind on this bit of /. fodder, which seems to have blown the Google outsourcing scandal right off the blogrolls.

Needless to say, I don’t expect my free host to pay hundreds and hundreds and a couple more hundreds of dollars so I can have a relatively insignificant update from MT 2.661 to MT 3.0. But I am a geek, so I can’t stagnate at MT 2.661 for the rest of my blogging life.

It was time for a change, anyway, so I took Mark Pilgrim’s tale of Freedom 0 to heart and installed WordPress. It’s a lot like MT, but it’s PHP based with no static pages. I was a little disappointed by the lack of staticicity, but it does seem to whip the pages out pretty quickly on the fly and seems cleaner all around.

On the down side, I had some troubles testing it on my Mac - I couldn’t get mod-rewrite to rewrite URLs (perhaps because WP didn’t have permission to write an .htaccess file), and the keychain choked on the beta I downloaded (RC1.2). At the moment I’m running version 1.0.2 with a slightly tweaked version of the wp new template. I was also tempted by Toni and Scandinavia (all from Alex King’s contest). When I get a chance, I’ll convert my MT blog style over to WordPress to get the navigation buttons back.

Some links that will help you join me and the other rats here on dry land:

• Carthik on moving from MT to WP
• The NuclearMoose WP CSS tutorial
• The non-WP options: Textpattern (not GPL’d), Blosxom, the ultimate in static page generation, and the overkill of Drupal
• [Update:] How to remove extra linebreaks in WordPress - an essential step if you have old Blogger linebreaks still hanging around
• The WordPress Wiki
• It turned out I had to generate the .htaccess file myself in order to get the rewritten URLs, and when it still wouldn’t work, this advice fixed it

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 16th, 2004 at 11:43 pm and is filed under WordPress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.