Dolavim.us

At the moment I’m mostly just annoyed by having to remember the very minimal CSS that I’d once figured out as well as trying to comprehend yet another theming system.

But I achieved the two basic things I wanted: post speed is higher by default and I can post from my phone easily.  So I figure I may as well just go for it.

I think I’ve managed to keep old links working thanks to all the static html MovableType left around for me.

It was pretty quick and simple to import from my MT blog export.

I really need to do some theme/css tweeking.  And set up a little photoblog roll in the front page.

I think my MT archives/links are going to actually move over more or less intact also which is a plus.

The iPhone WordPress app is working.

Managing the site is sooo much faster now.

No big surprise that I’ve hit this given it seems to be one of the most common problems WP users encounter. I’ve been trying to connect with the iPhone WordPress app and have not been succeeding. I still haven’t gotten around that, but I did notice that besides the main page, links were not working on the blog.
I’d changed to a non-default permalink option. And that was causing 404’s. It seems to be that when I do this WP was supposed to automagically update an .htaccess file for me, but this isn’t happening. Changing back to the default permalink style and sub-pages on the blog are working now.
Still no forward progress on the iPhone app connection hanging.
Between looking at the .htaccess and the Fedora wordpress-mu.conf for apache, it’s also clear to me that I’m not currently understanding how the site is supposed to work in general. I need a server work flow diagram or something that shows when a request comes in how it hits apache, what rules do/might apply, how it then hits which WordPress scripts, how those then pull up different content from the filesystem and database and direct to other URLs and any subsequent apache involvement around redirecting. There’s multiple pieces here, their interaction’s design isn’t clearly spelled out and involves a bit of magic, and I’m not a standard install. Plenty of places for subtle configuration breakage.
And configuration breakage is where I am.

Some first impressions of WordPress:

• WordPress seems very much influenced by MovableType, coming from the latter.  Who knows…maybe it was the other way around with MT4.  Either way the UI is all very similar.
• I run a server with multiple IPs and which hosts multiple domains.  Some of those have a blog.  It is unlikely I’d ever do anything other than have multiple domains on the machine, each with a single blog.  With MT I have to do multiple MT installs as best I can tell and admin them all.  Same for WordPress.  Although WordPress-MU potentially offers a way around that.  WordPress and WordPress-MU also are integrated into my OS’s package system.  If the blogging software is packaged with the OS and I only have that single instance installed, administration is easier.  I’ve got a fair amount of digging here to see if I can actually do what I want, but it sounds possible (Multi-Site Manager plugin?).  In MT I probably also could move to a single install of MT, but it’d still be a tarball I plunked down in the fs somewhere and managed manually.
• Security: I really like that it is very simple to tell WordPress that all user logins and administration should happen over SSL.  With MT this isn’t horribly hard, but involves a bit configuring in apache.
• Plugins:  At first it looked like I needed a special plugin just to send mail which seemed crazy.  Again, as with MT, I’m apparently not the normal WordPress user.  Most seem to admin their own WP instance in a virtual host that somebody else provides.  So they’d not be allowed to run a mail server and have to do mail via POP.  But I did end up getting a mail from WP so this did “just work”, but the config made it look like it wouldn’t.  I’m generally not crazy about having to run lots of plugins.
• Themes: I used to comprehend MT themes a bit, simple CSS and simple MT specific mark-up.  WP seems similar, but my first attempt at minimally making a mod’d theme doesn’t appear to have worked.  More poking to do I guess.

All things considered things look very similar between the two.  MT’s a bit more polished.

Next step is to try importing all my old content, checking if links were correctly preserved or if there’s apache url rewrite magic I can do to make them be, do some performance comparisons and try posting from my phone.

I’ve been contemplating moving off MovableType in favor of WordPress. There are two main reasons:

1. Performance: MovableType’s rebuilding is very annoying. My blog is fairly small, but post times are getting intolerably high. I think for my usage I’d sacrifice (or at least consider/compare) having the fast load time static pages for not having to build static pages frequently and being able to manipulate my blog/site quickly.
2. iPhone access: MovableType’s fine here if your blog is hosted by them. If you’re in their “power user” class of self-hoster, you’re just out of luck. You can browse to your blog, log in and painstakingly create simple text posts. But WordPress has a very clean simple app for phones which allows easy photoblogging.

I’m on vacation for a few days which gives me a chance to play with WordPress and learn a bit about how to admin it in my environment which isn’t the standard type of install for either WP or MT.
Some first impressions of WordPress:

• WordPress seems very much influenced by MovableType, coming from the latter. Who knows…maybe it was the other way around with MT4. Either way the UI is all very similar.
• I run a server with multiple IPs and which hosts multiple domains. Some of those have a blog. It is unlikely I’d ever do anything other than have multiple domains on the machine, each with a single blog. With MT I have to do multiple MT installs as best I can tell and admin them all. Same for WordPress. Although WordPress-MU potentially offers a way around that. WordPress and WordPress-MU also are integrated into my OS’s package system. If the blogging software is packaged with the OS and I only have that single instance installed, administration is easier. I’ve got a fair amount of digging here to see if I can actually do what I want, but it sounds possible (Multi-Site Manager plugin?). In MT I probably also could move to a single install of MT, but it’d still be a tarball I plunked down in the fs somewhere and managed manually.
• Security: I really like that it is very simple to tell WordPress that all user logins and administration should happen over SSL. With MT this isn’t horribly hard, but involves a bit configuring in apache.
• Plugins: At first it looked like I needed a special plugin just to send mail which seemed crazy. Again, as with MT, I’m apparently not the normal WordPress user. Most seem to admin their own WP instance in a virtual host that somebody else provides. So they’d not be allowed to run a mail server and have to do mail via POP. But I did end up getting a mail from WP so this did “just work”, but the config made it look like it wouldn’t. I’m generally not crazy about having to run lots of plugins.
• Themes: I used to comprehend MT themes a bit, simple CSS and simple MT specific mark-up. WP seems similar, but my first attempt at minimally making a mod’d theme

doesn’t appear to have worked. More poking to do I guess.
All things considered things look very similar between the two. MT’s a bit more polished.
Next step is to try importing all my old content, checking if links were correctly preserved or if there’s apache url rewrite magic I can do to make them be, do some performance comparisons and try posting from my phone.