Blosxom to WordPress
I finally completed a longstanding project converting this blog from Blosxom to WordPress. Five years ago when I transitioned from a self-coded blog to blosxom, I loved the low tech “hackable” nature of Blosxom. Unfortunately, it hasn’t scaled well. I can imagine using WordPress five years from now, but the Blosxom filesystem-only style organization just won’t hold up.
At some point soon while it’s still fresh in my memory I will document the transition. Since nearly every Blosxom user has a unique set of quirks, each transition will have its own special problems.
I’ve made every effort to preserve permalinks from the old blog, but I’m not sure they all made it over. If you are looking for something and can’t find it, please drop me a line.
I also suspect that my most recent entries will repeat themselves for everyone who subscribes to this RSS feed. I apologize for any inconvenience.
Steve Laniel Jan 28
Nice! I look forward to skewering this transition in casual conversation with my friends, at those parties where we make fun of database-backed blogs.
I don’t know that filesystem-only blogs are the trouble. I’m sure it’s possible to design such a thing and make it scale well. I just don’t think Blosxom does it well. Partly that’s because of the Blosxom Way — namely, that it’s the simplest conceivable layer above a filesystem, and that absolutely anyone could write a plugin to it. I’ve been in discussions on the Blosxom list where people have rejected certain solutions because they complexify the code and make it less accessible to novice hackers. Anyone can write a Blosxom plugin with just a few minutes of reading about the blog package.
All that said: database-backed blogs are the way to go. They can be done badly, though, and WP has had some scalability problems that we encountered when running ThinkProgress. But since WP is the wave of the present, I presume its bugs are going to be fixed in time.
Chung-chieh Shan Jan 28
Eww! PHP!
Jason Jan 28
Hey, I just finished doing a WP install for my work website. I’m planning on moving PIHP over to WP in the next weeks. I’d be interested to know what you did re: plugins and widgets and such.