Here it is, the tenth and largest ever revision of blog.adamscheinberg.com. After a long decision-making process, I decided to migrate to WordPress. There are a number of reasons why I did this, but here are a few.
First of all, WordPress is actively developed… a lot. Small Axe is a lot of fun, but it’s a hobby, and although one I enjoy, it was a lot of work. On top of that, certain features were a challenge for me that I simply never had enough time to implement, such as a quality API. With WordPress, I can post from my iPhone. Or Flickr. Or Digg. Etc.
I was also able to preserve my permalink structure with this code. I’ve developed a decent standing in Google, one I’m fearing I will have destroyed with this migration, but it was important that my links be maintained.
Themes with WordPress are a snap. Honestly, changing the look and feel is cake once it’s uploaded.
The migration to WordPress was PAINFUL! Importing the feeds was easy enough, it can be done via RSS, so I quickly edited my RSS script to output my whole blog. Boom! Done. But getting comments in was a lot of work. I think I’ve covered all of them though, and that’s exciting.
One problem is that my “tags” came over as “categories” and my “topics” were entirely discarded. Had I been a little smarter about WordPress, I could easily have fixed that. But that part doesn’t really bother me, so it will stay reversed. Dammit.
I’m still considering whether I want to host my own comments or push them into Disqus. I really like Disqus, but I’m not entirely certain about pushing my blog content to a third party service.
Overall, I’m pretty happy with this iteration and the theme I’ve adopted. The HTML needs some work, there are a few pages/site features I’ve still not properly migrated, but all in all, I’m feeling good about this move. It gives me more time to focus on other PHP projects, WordPress add-ons, and OSNews. I’ll keep you all posted, and now that I’ve upgraded to a new codebase, I promise to update more often. In the meantime, enjoy blog.adamscheinberg.com 10.
Congrats. I just made my own migration from custom code to Drupal earlier this year. (WordPress scarred me on first use and I have yet to forgive it.)
Still haven’t migrated my posts over from Blogger.com knowing it will probably be as painful as you have indicated but that’s lower on the list right now. I still have a fantasy football site to rewrite from CLASSIC ASP. Good times.