U-Over-Haul

This site has just undergone a complete overhaul. Not just selecting a new style template, but a complete replacement of the technology behind it and rebuilding from scratch on that new foundation. OK, I'm still using HTTP and the ASCII character set and so on, but I'm no longer using Blogger. I've swapped it for the Movable Type "personal publishing system".

Blogger's a nice system run by nice folks, but their server had some problems yesterday, and was down this morning. (With that Microsoft-carried shit going around the net these days, it's little surprise.) No big deal, since I'd hosted the site here on my own server. My site was still up. But it meant I couldn't use their tools to update it. I'm sure it's an isolated incident (especiallty now that Google is running the service) but I have no patience for that sort of dependency, so my "if you want something done right..." reaction kicked in. Time to install my own content-management system.

I started exploring what sort of open-source software was out there. (Hey, self-reliance doesn't mean reinventing the wheel.) I looked at several options, but Greymatter and Movable Type seemed the best suited to my purposes: well-regarded, widely-used, Linux-friendly, weblog publishing tools, that I could use free of charge. Movable Type isn't truly free (you have to pay for commercial or shared use), but I like its support for categories, which was something I was already trying to hack onto Blogger's system, so it got the nod.

It wasn't too difficult to install. The biggest frustration came from the fact that (of the several database options it supports) I chose MySQL... which requires a wee bit of do-it-yourself setup, and I'd forgotten most of what I'd once learned about the system. After a little swearing and some browsing of the docs, I had the whole Movable Type system up and running. It has the ability to import Blogger data, but I figured it'd be easier to cut and paste the handful of entries I'd already made. The hardest part of the whole process was turning the painfully bland default template into something more appealing... which I might have avoided if I'd thought to check MovableType.org for some alternative style sheets which would've given me a head start. So I got to flex my CSS muscles a bit as well. But this overhaul didn't turn out bad for a few hours' work (if I may say so myself).