I spent all last night porting my Drupal blog over to WordPress. I did this for a few reasons.
One – To avoid having to manually update Drupal to the latest version. My host, Bluehost provides SimpleScripts which makes instillation and updates a one button process. This will greatly cut back time spent doing maintenance and give me more time to work on my screenplay.
Two – Drupal is built to be more of a powerful and flexible CMS rather than simple blogging tool and consequently has a broader feature set. When I started the this blog over a year ago I thought I would use some of those additional features but as it turns out I use less of them. And if Failed Screenwriter is just going to be a blog, WordPress is the better suited tool. For one, the plugins that I’m most concerned about are updated quicker and many nice to have features are defaults in WordPress.
Three – I want to get more intertwined with the community while at the same time not get buried in spam. Features like Trackback and Pingback are great for this and are supported natively on WordPress.
So I bit the bullet and switched last night. I even moved most of my older blog posts even though I didn’t worry too much about keeping their original URLs. Then today I noticed my RSS feeds weren’t being updated in Google Reader. In trying to trouble shoot the problem I completely forked my WordPress instillation. My whole blog basically exploded. Boy was I not a happy camper. Not being a developer I wasn’t about to waste more time trying troubleshoot everything, so I decided to start again fresh.
This time instead of importing my old posts I decided to make this a clean start. I also believe that my old posts were the reason for the original RSS update problem. My original concerns were not being able to keep my original URL structures and my RSS subscribers. I wasn’t so worried about the URLs yesterday as anything older than a week is pretty dead in the land of blogs, for a lot of people on FriendFeed anything over 12 hours is old.
RSS subscribers I am very concerned with. I hate the thought that people might have to resubscribe but if I’m ever going to make the move, today is a better than in a month.
I’m trying to keep a positive attitude about all this. One thing it will enable, is for me to have a fresh start on my message. I’ll get to review what I’ve written and only carry over the most pertinent pieces. An essential step whenever trying to focus a message.
If my site is causing you to get broken links or you have to resubscribe to my RSS feed, I apologize but the thing kind of exploded on me – what was I to do.
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