Warning, pure blogging geek content ahead…

This blog now has MovableType as the content management engine behind it. I’m pretty impressed with the software, particularly how polished it is and how excellent the documentation is.

I made the switch out of some frustration with Blogger service outages and a desire to have the site be more self-sufficient. MT’s got an import feature, so moving my 175 blog entries(!) over was pretty straightforward.

Because I was publishing XML out of Blogger, I just needed to get MT to produce the same XML format and my PHP templates are happily churning along, none the wiser that the publishing engine has changed.

The damage from the move seems to be minor. A doubled time stamp on most of my older posts. I’m hoping to write a script to get rid of that. (UPDATE 2:50 AM: Whoa. MT has search and replace, with perl regex, built in. Doubled dates are gone. This software rocks my world!) My old, uh, permalinks are semi-broken. The thousands of users who have bookmarked my individual posts will still end up the right week, but their anchor tag won’t work. This is because I was unable to preserve the entry IDs while importing from Blogger.

The upside, besides self-hosting and (hopefully) more consistent availability, is a lot more flexibility to add new features. Email-this-entry would be cool, and maybe comments, too.