Rough Book

Well, I finally did it. I decided to migrate over to WordPress! For a long time I was thinking of rewriting my homegrown blogging-engine (that I initially designed over seven years ago). I never got around to doing it because it was just so much work! I know part of it has to do with the “reinventing the wheel” syndrome. There is a certain pride that a developer has in coming up with his own solution for a problem. But then I realized that the problem has already been solved, but other people, with more resources than I, and in a much nicer way that I could ever do. I also realized that any new design would be a constant work in progress, and frankly, that just gets tiring after a while.

So, I made the decision to use WordPress. This meant that I would have to migrate all my old posts from my old database into WordPress’s database. Thanks to WordPress’s excellent database-schema documentation, this wasn’t hard at all. I wrote a Perl migration-script to move all my posts, comments, and tags into WordPress. I also had to make some changes to my .htaccess file (and write a redirect php page) to ensure that links in the old format would get translated into the new format. Everything seems to be working pretty well so far! I know there are a few rough edges to sand down (basically the old project pages, which aren’t visible now) but I don’t think it should be that difficult.

To my readers (the two or three of you!) if you spot anything out of the ordinary in my old posts (bad formatting, unparsed tags, broken links) please let me know so that I can fix it! Oh and another thing, since WordPress makes it so easy to add new posts, I think I will be writing a whole lot more!