So, Sam has moved onto Wordpress, and changed away from Fireburst to samsharpe.net. And got rid of all his former entries, again. That’s something that would have narked me 11 months ago, since I was very much into the whole ‘URLs are permanent, and all data on the intarweb should be so too’ philosophy, but with that, and many other things, I’m proud to say I don’t really care anymore.

In an attempt to directly contradict myself, I’ve ensured that if you try following an old link to a weblog post, you get redirected to the new archives. Cause there’s just sooo many people linking to my old weblog posts. I’ll give it a couple of days, and retire the old database.

Mike has also started using Wordpress, so that makes three of us in as many weeks. I wonder if anyone else is going to give it a whirl…

I’ve now added all the posts from my old Chasing Rainbows weblog to this one. Although I’m not exactly proud of some of the posts (to put it mildly), there’s just about enough interesting things in there to make it worth while keeping them. So with a trusty SSH session and some PHP (and a fair bit of luck) I managed to convert my old weblog database into the new Wordpress format, and managed not to screw anything up.

I’m not going to turn on comments for them though, and I’m not going to go through them all and try classifying them, since that would be a bit boring.

Today’s exercise in coding reminded me again why I’ve made the switch from a home-grown weblog to using a properly developed one (not quite off-the-shelf or shrink-wrapped, but you know what I mean). Next time I want to change backend, I know that someone else will have written an import script, and I won’t have to bodge one together myself. And now that I’ve spent about two working-days on the switch, I’ve gone from entering data into the database by hand, to having a proper admin interface, categories, sub-categories, comments, pingback and trackback, drafting, private entries, searching, linkrolls, plugin interfaces… which would have taken quite some time if I’d done it myself. And every time I’m in the pub, or sleeping, or whatever else, I know someone else is improving the software that runs my weblog. Which is nice. And I was getting fed up of the whole wheel-reimplementation thing anyway.