movable type

Switching to WordPress

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I’d been using Movable Type for years, but had grown disenchanted with their dual-architecture of Perl+PHP. And I guess my life just wasn’t complicated enough. And I had the general sense that the Mandate of Heaven had shifted towards WordPress, so I’m using that now.

Making this page look as much like my old page as possible (with, I hope, some improvements) has been a good opportunity to learn about the software. I started by hacking on what must be the most complicated theme available, K2, which in hindsight was pretty dumb—I’ve pared away a lot its interesting bells and whistled, and added a few of my own.

Each platform has its pros and cons. WordPress has better management of static pages, and seems to have a more active developer community. Movable Type has some nice back-end tools that WordPress either lacks or can only offer via plugins. WP seems to have much cleaner and more effective spam-fighting tools (Spam Karma is pretty amazing). There’s a big conceptual difference between MT templates and WP themes—I’m more comfortable with the template idiom, so dealing with themes is taking some mental adjustment. MT’s tags are atomic—they correspond to a bare chunk of programmatically generated text. With WP, tags are function calls, in many cases producing formatted output with the format determined by an argument in the function. Getting at the atomic unit at all requires delving into the code to see what’s going on.

Somewhat to my chagrin, all my permalinks have changed in this process. And I’ve also lost all my folksonomic tags, but I knew that would happen. Come to think of it, I kinda knew that I’d lose my permalinks. But since the URL format is so very similar, it seems that someone who actually knows what he’d doing could probably write a ModRewrite htaccess doohicky to intercept invalid old URLs and figure out if they are near-misses for valid new URLs and redirect to those. Alas, I am not that person.

Old blog, new domain

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I’m back to using Movable Type, although I’m intrigued enough with WordPress that I may continue fidding with it behind the scenes.

One thing that really is new is my domain name—it looks as if that deal is going through. My old e-mail address should continue working for a few months, and there should be redirects for this and a few other subdirectories that should also last for that period, but now would be a good time to update your address book and bookmarks. Wherever you see “crossroads.net”, change it to “8stars.org” (or “eightstars.org” if you prefer—they both work).

Why 8stars? It’s an obscure visual pun. The Chinese character for rice, ç±³, looks like an 8-pointed star (in fact, the Japanese nickname for the asterisk is “kome-jirushi,” or “rice-mark”). You can see a stylized version of this character in the header of this blog—I’ve actually been using that mark for some time. I would have registered 8star.org, but someone else already had. So I went with the plural. 8pointedstar.org is just too damn verbose.

It is with some regret that I part with the old domain name: I’ve had it since 1994, and really thought I’d have it permanently. As silly as it may be, that domain name had become part of my self-image. There’s also a practical reason to regret it: having a durable e-mail address has allowed some people to contact me at that address even after many years of silence. The flipside, of course, is that I get an ungodly amount of spam. So there’s a silver lining. Plus, well, there’s the money. Not enough to retire on, but enough to make a significant difference in my retirement fund, buy a few toys, and go on a trip.