After playing with Movable Type for the first time last week, I was sold. It's a fantastic piece of software, and after installing and configuring it for a project at work -- seeing how easy it was, there was no reason not to use it here. The volume of features that are automatic make converting a no-brainer.
For a few years, I had been building this site myself, in the end using a homegrown Perl/XSLT app that was fun to build, but didn't do everything I wanted it to. I'm excited to learn everything that MT can do.
So, I broke a few links. Actually, all old permalinks are currently dead ends. That's a huge no no, I realize. I'm working on a mod_rewrite solution. There are also many entries still to be imported. For the past year and a half data was stored in XML -- which came in very handy for importing these into MT. But going back a ways, posts were basically handcoded. I'll have to enter these one by one I'm afraid.
This site now sports comments, search and bunch of other features that I probably don't even know about yet. All hail, Movable Type. I also rewrote SimplePost and am using the new, streamlined version exclusively for the QuickBits mini-blog in the right column. This'll give me a place to continue to play with Perl and XSLT. I could've easily used MT for this, but it's hard to part with old friends. The QuickBits RSS feed now lists only the most recent 10 entries, rather than the entire archive. Much better.
The reason for the sudden switch happens to be the fact that we (just today) launched a weblog at Fast Company. FC Now will feature entries and comments from writers that grace the pages of the magazine, as well as a host of other web team members. Should be very interesting. Oh, and it's powered by MT. The whole thing took less than a week to get up and running.
Now it's time to talk about things other than boring site news. Please bear with me as I work out the kinks around here.