Weblogs

Why The Change To WordPress?

A confluence of threads. Firstly, my previous template was so FUBAR'd that it's a wonder if even rendered at all. It started life as a 2000 era Blogger template and through various iterations turned into a Movable Type template, picking up every coding mistake and no-no you could imagine. This is not surprising, I never knew any HTML when I started playing with it. I know a little more today.

Secondly, I was getting plain fed-up with the interminable comment spam problems on Movable Type. Even with the latest improvements. Most days I'd have to shovel out upwards of 50 spam comments. I'm sure I could have tweaked MT to deal with it. But.

Thirdly, I felt like a change. Wordpress is actually very cool.

In time I'll tweak the design a little, probably only the masthead after I've worked out how to reconstitute the old motorway image into this layout. Maybe. I've come to realise that blog mastheads are like haircuts and the fact that I keep changing mine must be the signature of some deeper emotional dysfunction or quirk.

MT 3.2

I upgraded to the new version of Movable Type v3.2 which, after just a cursory glance, looks like it has a load of new functionality including infinitely more mature comment / spam moderation facilities.

I did intend to nuke my template and start from scratch since the current one tracks it ancestry back to a 2001 era Blogger template which has turned into Frankenstein's Monster over the years. But, alas, I'm sticking with the current one until I have more time to faff about with CSS and the like - but I did knacker my archive index. BTW, this is just a verbose test post to make sure I wired it all up correctly - which is hard when you don't know your cgi-bin from your PHP from your octal read/write/execute permissions like me.

Lonely Thoughts Club

I only manage to listen to one podcast with any regularity, and that is Adam Curry's Daily Source Code which usually lasts about as long as my morning commute to the office.

Today (yesterday's DSC) had Adam opining about what the "War On Terror" is really about, more from a practical standpoint than a political one. And he more or less said exactly what I said last year in a short posting on the same subject.

It's so cool that today we have technologies like blogs and podcasts recording and therefore allowing for the joining of the dots between what would otherwise be completely disconnected thoughts.