I have no intention of starting some sort of religious war over blogging software, but I thought I briefly describe why I decided to use Moveable Type over some alternatives.

Really it was fairly simple. I wanted a replacement for Blogger due to its lack of support for categories, recent comments, some other features, and the lack of any public roadmap about when they were planning to add such support. Some of those I could hack around using some PHP, but it was definitely not ideal.

But whatever software I was going to use needed to preserve the filenames of all my existing posts:

• there are a number of incoming links that point to specific pages in my blog
• people already subscribe to the existing rss feed at /rss.xml
• my limited Google rank is based on individual pages, not the site as a whole

So, I was very keen to leave the existing page names intact. The other bogging software I seriously considered was WordPress. It is generally very good, but only supports dynamic page generation (i.e. the web server generates the HTML dynamically whever it is requrested). In contrast, Moveable Type allows either dynamic or static page generation, and critically, allows the base filename of the page to be set.

Consequently, all that was needed was to import my existing site into Moveable Type with the correct filenames. There is a default importer, but it is pretty crap. Fortunately, I have done a fair bit of software development in my time, and so wrote my own.

More on that next time.

Posted by Dave Bryant at 9:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)