BookBlog now on WordPress

After a moderate amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth, I’ve successfully migrated BookBlog over to WordPress.   And comments are working again!

The short version of the saga — my hosting provider had disabled comments on the old version of MT because of the server suck.  I needed to either upgrade or move.  The upgrade failed, so I moved.  The MovableType content export/import worked swimmingly, so the old posts are here, with pictures and comments.

The WordPress install was a pleasure, and I’m happy to be using a tool with a lively community. MovableType is making a reasonable decision focusing on its business customer base, while WordPress focuses on personal use, small business, and the technically savvy folk who help others.

Spiffing up the blog feels emotionally like a good-sized home improvement project. Like a house, it’s a space that I share with others and is a mode of self-expression. Having a creaky blog with broken comments and obsolete sidebars feels badly wrong and anti-social – it’s like having broken chairs and cracked windows. Fixing things up feels like a good spring cleaning and repair.

The long version saga, for the very few of you who’ve been wondering why comments have been out of commission for a while (the rest of you feel free to move on)…

In 2006, I disabled comments because of the epidemic of blog spam. In 2007 I was working too much to look into the problem. Last year, when I tried to re-enable comments, I found that my hosting provider had disabled MT comments for version 3 because of server load. In order to re-enable comments I needed to upgrade to MT4 (or move to WordPress). Before I did anything, the hosting provider needed to upgrade the MySQL servers. MT editing barely worked, 500 errors were chronic, and WordPress wouldn’t have worked at all (because views hit the database). Last weekend, the db server was upgraded. So this weekend was blog upgrade weekend. Thanks to those of you who’ve been patient enough to email comments in the meantime 🙂

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