Sunday, April 30

Pondering content-management options

Increasingly, I feel the desire to be able to do more sophisticated things with this blog. For instance, I would appreciate being able to organize posts by category, as well as being able to send and receive trackbacks. I would also like to be able to host my own content management system, so I won't be out in the cold whenever Blogger (frequently) goes down. Having the ability to establish user profiles with differing access levels also has some appeal, given the wide variety of people who read this blog, and the varied purposes for which they do. At this stage, I should probably have a blogroll, as well.

The most comprehensive (and expensive) option is to switch to MovableType, which would cost about $200 - the amount I pay for four years of hosting at sindark.com. TypePad - also from six apart - is about $50 a year. WordPress is an appealing free option, seemingly used by many of the better blogs I read. I like that it is licensed under the GPL.

The most important consideration is ease of continuity. I need to shift more than 1200 posts (not all of them obviously part of a sibilant intake of breath), along with hundreds of images. Also, any viable transfer will need to include the automatic alteration of internal links to reflect the new structure. Clearly, it's not a project to be taken on during the middle of a term.

Has anyone made the transition from Blogger to WordPress or TypePad? If so, how difficult did you find it? Were you able to broadly transfer things automatically, or did it take a lot of manual tweaking? Also, what made you decide to switch and for what reasons are you either glad or regretful about doing so.

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In the interests of fair and comprehensive reporting, I should disclose that special forces teams are already operating inside WordPress - reconnoitering and marking targets to be followed up upon later. The important thing to to have a really sound post-migration plan in place, reducing the possibility of some kind of data insurgency from posts or other components that prove resistant to being integrated into the new order.

Posted by Milan at 1:33 PM