magpiebrain

Since I signed up to TextDrive I’ve been planning this move. Finally, after several weekends of intense inactivity punctuated with the occasional burst of activity, the blog should be moved. Pretty much all the links should be working, but email me if anything is mis-behaving.

TextDrive

I’ve had no real complaints with my old host, “Gradwell”:http://www.gradwell.com/. Sure, the web control panel needed some interface work, and they weren’t as up to date with new software, but they were solid enough and the support was prompt. The recent TextDrive lifetime hosting offer was enough to tempt me. Given that I was already a “Strongspace”:http://www.strongspace.com/ user the $500 deal ended up paying for itself in a year. Add in great support (both via the forums or via email), up to date software packages and the fact that they donate 50% of their profits to supporting a selection of open source software development and I was sold. Needless to say I’ve not been disappointed since my move.

Wither MovableType – and TextPattern

Yes, after using MovableType for many years I’ve also switched blogging software. My original choice was “TextPattern”:http://www.textpattern.com/ which I use to run another site. I like TextPattern a lot – it’s interface, easy install, ease of customisation. One thing I don’t like is the problematic handling of clean URLs. I needed to remap easily URLs from the old blog to the new using mod_rewrite, and it was very hard with Textpattern. In the end WordPress made the process much simpler. TextPattern does have a steep learning curve – but if the way it decides to handle URLs works for you and like the extreme customisation possible then it might be the one for you.

Enter WordPress

In desperation after many weekends of TextPattern tweaking I tried installing WordPress. As the documentation suggests it really does only take five minutes to install. I’ve bee greatly impressed. The admin interface is clean, there are a wealth of plugins available (and can be easily managed), and the theme handling is very handy for a compulsive tweaker like myself.

Hemingway

The design is a slightly modified “Hemingway” theme. The original really is a very nice piece of work. Over the coming weeks I plan to continue to tweak it, but I’ll be keeping the changes small and incremental – there have been enough changes recently!

p(update). _Update_ I’ve fixed a problem with the montly archive links from the old site not working. Images in articles seem screwed up right now though – but I can’t fix that while behind a corporate firewall Images should now be fixed too.