So I’ve finally given in, I’ve switched my blog to run on WordPress.
This is the fourth time in six-odd years of blogging that I’ve had to change the blogging software.
For the last couple of years, my blog was been running on MangoBlog. It is really nice and I quite liked the fact that it was running on ColdFusion. More important, it was nicely customizable.
Prior to MangoBlog I had been using BlogCFC, and had found a bit restricting in terms of theme support etc. MangoBlog made it easy to re-theme the blog, plus has a nice plugin architecture.
I had toyed with moving to WordPress an year or so back. But wasn’t too convinced. But when I re-evaluated it in detail last month, I was struck by its maturity and the dizzying number of really useful plugins and themes.
This weekend I gave it a whirl and setup a dev instance on an Amazon Micro instance. It didn’t take too long for me to decide that the time had come to switch.
The process of migration from MangoBlog to WordPress was quite simple.
I had to write a couple of simple scripts that gathered data from MangoBlog tables and inserted it into WordPress tables. I also set up a couple redirects so that old links continue to work. And I updated the Feedburner feed details so that the feed from the old blog points to the feed from the new blog.
And here it is! Shiny and new with a decent theme!
While moving the blog across, I decided to do away with the many categories I had in the previous blog. I’m going to now categorize posts based on what broad areas like “Software Development”, “Photography”, etc. This reflects the change in the nature of my blogging. Till now I’ve been quite focused on tech blogging. But I’m going to broaden the scope a bit. And I’ll be using tags to categorize posts as more detailed mechanism of categorization.
The other major change I made was to change the permalink structure of blog entries. It is now extremely simple and minimalistic — server name followed by the slug (e.g., http://blog.nagpals.com/hello-wordpress).
The more I’ve played with Ruby on Rails, Grails, and CFWheels, the more I’ve become a fan of simplicity in URIs. For me they are windows into an application — they give a sneak peak on how well an application is structure. I even go a step further and say that if you look carefully, they give you a view of the mind of the application developer! But more on that in another blog post.
For now, the migration from MangoBlog to WordPress is over. It was very smooth and painless. And I’m quite happy to be getting back to blogging again!
The RSS Feeds for the blog are:
- Feed for the whole blog
- Feed for just the Software Development Category
If you don’t want to be bothered with other ramblings, just subscribe to the Software Development category RSS.
Do drop me a line if you have any questions/issues with the new blog.
I’ve agreed with you in the past (and still agree) about URL design. It was the defining feature that brought me over to ColdFusion on Wheels.
Here is something that I wrote about concerning URLs on my internet marketing blog. The Tim Berners-Lee article that I link to in it is killer too!
http://www.clearcrystalmedia.com/gc/urls-and-seo/
That was quick Chris. Before I could send you a mail saying that I’ve switched to WordPress after conversation with you the other day, you have left left a comment!
Just saw your article. Well summarized. For me, it was Ruby on Rails that turned on my interest in seeing URLs as indicators of quality of web software.
And CFWheels bring it to ColdFusion — which for me was also one of the reasons for starting to use CFWheels.