Well, it’s official: OTB has switched from Movable Type to WordPress. While MT is a very robust platform, it’s a huge space hog for those who, like me, use individual archives for posts and post a lot. There are 6581 posts and counting on OTB. Furthermore, the way it’s designed requires a “rebuild” every time a post is edited, a comment is added, and so forth. Some things require rebuilds of the entire site. As a site gets bigger, it takes longer and longer to do that. Even on broadband, it was taking over 30 minutes.
I had resisted the changeover because I wanted to maintain all the functionality of the site and only MT allowed things like inline TrackBacks (see, for example, the Beltway Traffic Jam, where all the TrackBacks from other blogs show up as links below my signature block) and because WordPress combined comments and TrackBacks in the same listing, which I found annoying. Kathy Kinsley, of the On the Third Hand blog and BlogHouse web design, created plug-ins to fix those things and imported the 6581 posts, 16,213 comments, and ensured that all old links are properly redirected. She charges a nominal fee for the service.
If you notice any glitches, let me know in the comments section of this post or via e-mail.
UPDATE: Posting time is approximately 1 million times faster.
UPDATE: And it’s nice to be able to make minor edits to one template and have it automatically show up throughout the site.
