Les Jones: Light Blogging - Attempting a Switch to Wordpress

April 17, 2007

Blogging > Light Blogging - Attempting a Switch to Wordpress

I've been thinking about moving to WordPress, and today I received a little motivation. My Web host sent me a third warning about my CPU usage. I'm thinking WordPress will have less overhead than MovableType. Also, SCode - the plugin that generates the anti-spam captcha in comments - occasionally runs out of control and takes down the blog. It's happened three times lately. SCode has never been upgraded beyond the 1.0 version I'm using, so it looks like a dead end. UPDATE: and the morning after I wrote that SCode took the site down again.

The Wordpress test install is here. It's a temporary location, so please don't link to it. It isn't much to look at, but tonight I installed and configured WordPress, discovered how to map the WordPress URLs to the same URLs I had with MovableType so my links won't break, and imported my blog entries and comments.

That last part didn't go too well. It looks like only about half of the entries imported. The MovableType file was too big for WordPress to import, so I had to use the UNIX split command to break it into bite-sized chunks. That may have had something to do with the problem, but it's too late for me to start combing through the split files tonight. Menada.

In the meantime, does anyone know any secrets to importing MovableType entries into WordPress?

Posted by lesjones | TrackBack

Comments

Les,
Lynn at the Lynnsterzone can probably answer any questions you might have. She has been a wealth of information for many of us who made the move. There are import tools that can move yourself to you new place.
The other good thing about wordpress is the Askimet spam filter. I have found it very useful as well as commenting, because people sign up once and do not have to enter security codes which is good. Wordpress remembers for you.
Good luck with your move,
'coma

Posted by: newscoma at April 17, 2007

Yeah, glad to see you're moving. The whole "captcha" thing is something I'm ready to see die off.

Wish I could help with the move, but I don't know enough about it. You might try exporting to a different format, if MT will let you, and doing it that way.

But your best bet is prob to go to the wordpress.org forums. There are some good people over there, and they pride themselves on their forums.

Posted by: jonathan hickman at April 17, 2007

Thanks, guys. I'll poke around in the forums and see what I can find, and I may email Lynnster.

I'm looking forward to trying some of the WP plug-ins.

Posted by: Les Jones at April 17, 2007

Wordpress has a great plugin called WP-Cache that's well accepted in the WP community. It caches posts that are viewed more than once, for whatever amount of time you specify. I've used it on about 10 blogs so far without trouble.

For more caching techniques, such as mysql and php caching, check out this article (not related to me):

http://elliottback.com/wp/archives/2007/04/15/why-my-wordpress-site-is-so-much-faster-than-yours/

Posted by: Bil at April 17, 2007