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I said earlier that I would write about why I’ve made the move from Movabletype to WordPress. I want to say right at the start that my decision really isn’t a criticism of Movabletype. It has served me extremely well for more than a year, and has made my life immeasurably easier. But one thing I’ve found as I’ve been keeping this blog is that your needs (and skills) change as time goes on, so that you can’t necessarily forsee what you will need in a blogging tool a year or two years down the line. The thing that prompted my itchy feet in the end was the problem of rebuilding the site.

Movabletype (MT) and WordPress (WP) have a lot of similarities (indeed, many of the new features I’ve included in my new design could have been accomplished with MT), but one fundamental difference: MT produces static web pages, and WP produces dynamic ones. This difference is an important one; every time the content of the page needs to change in a static system (which can happen quite frequently with a weblog with comments, trackbacks and so on), the entire page needs to be rebuilt. If you have monthly and category archives, those pages need to be rebuilt too. Rebuilding is pretty speedy when you have a small number of posts, but it gets slower as time goes on and you accumulate more content. However, with a dynamic system, the changes are made the instant someone reloads the page.

I tried a number of different blogging tools, but eventually settled on WP after setting up a test blog and playing with it for a while. It’s a great system—extremely easy to install and configure, and yet with a lot of scope for advanced customization. Better yet, it’s Open Source, so anyone can contribute hacks and fixes for it. It’s also free as in beer. Not that I begrudge paying for software, especially something that I depend on every day. I donated to MT when I started using it, and I consider that money very well spent.

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I’ve finished the bulk of the tinkering now, so you should see a shiny new PHP-based design, powered by WordPress. I’ll write more later on why I made the move from Movabletype, but for now I’m a bit exhausted. I’ve added redirects from the main index page of the old blog, as well as redirects for the individual archive pages, so with any luck, permalinks shouldn’t break. Your mileage may vary…

Some of the older entries look odd because I wrote them using Textile, so I’ll gradually clean them up. Let me know what you think. Oh, and don’t forget to update your RSS newsreader with the new feed addresses (see the bottom of the sidebar to the right).