Redesign and Move to WordPress

I've finally succumbed to the lure of WordPress. The migration was mostly painless although I find the php functions that WordPress uses somewhat limiting. I know I have the full power of PHP at my disposal now, but even so the default functions presuppose a particular style of HTML authoring. I've tweaked the default template to something I'm happy with. Visitors to the web site will see a completely new look and feel. All you out there in RSS-land should hopefully see no change :)

Why did I change? It wasn't because of the MT pricing. And it wasn't because of slow rebuilds. In fact, the dynamic aspect of WordPress has been the main barrier to my switching. I'm somewhat uncomfortable with rebuilding a page from scratch on each request when I know it's unlikely to change very frequently (as any regular visitors to this site can testify!). Also, baked pages can reuse all that lovely caching code and HTTP optimisations built into Apache. Dynamic systems end up re-implementing it, usually in an inferior way.

No, the primary reason for changing was comments. I've had a long love/hate relationship with comments on this site but recently I've had a couple of emails from visitors that would have been better posted as a comment. Anyway, I dislike the MT comment system intensly, the new centralised system even more so. WordPress brings one simple feature as core: moderation.

Finally, I've done my best to keep URIs the same between the old setup and the new but inevitably there will be some that I've missed. If you spot one, let me know. Hey, you could even use the new comments system on this post! How's that for progress?

Permalink: http://blog.iandavis.com/2004/09/redesign-and-move-to-wordpress/

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