WordPress
For months now I’ve been planning to switch from Movable Type to WordPress. I’ve been driven over the edge by a flood of comment spam over the past year, for which the only solution I’d found with Movable Type was turning off comments altogether on old posts (and sometimes on newer ones). I’ve heard very good things about the Wordpress Akismet plug-in, so I’ve moved everything over to WordPress with the hope that comment spam will mostly vanish. We’ll see.
When I finally sat down to do the migration tonight, I figured it’d take hours. After all, importing from Radio Userland to Movable Type took a very long time when I did that a few years ago. I was pleasantly surprised this time around. Despite some out of date instructions on the Wordpress site and some odd problems with the software — why is the memory limit on imports so low? — nearly everything went smoothly.
Permalinks are undoubtedly all messed up. Sorry about that. If enough people complain bitterly maybe I’ll do something about it, but for now I’m just happy that I have a site where I can post things and folks can comment back without me having to spend more time deleting comment spam than I spend writing posts.
tim Said,
February 25, 2007 @ 6:23 am
Well this comment is a bit late but I’ve eliminate comment spam completely on mt using akismet + keystrokes +disguising the comment url…
I actually switched from wordpress to mt because of spam problems… spam is an epidemic unfortunately and no platform is immune….
My wife runs a wordpress blog… she uses akismet + Bayesian Comment Spam Filter + Comments Post Rewriter Plugin.
Daniel Jalkut Said,
February 25, 2007 @ 6:49 am
Welcome to WordPress! I’m sure you’ll be impressed with Akismet. It’s just amazing.
Daniel Jalkut Said,
February 25, 2007 @ 6:51 am
Oh - and you probably saw this, but WordPress has built-in support for editing permalink structure. I don’t remember if your old format was too wacky to represent in WP’s templated form, but it might be worth looking at if you want to maintain the old style.
Schwieb Said,
February 25, 2007 @ 8:20 am
Indeed, Akismet rocks! I get about 95% spam in my comments, yet only a few break through the Akismet process.
Eric Said,
February 25, 2007 @ 11:42 am
No spam so far.
As for the permalink structure, I could probably maintain the old format, but I’m not exactly tied to it. I don’t even remember what it was.
If anyone points out a problem, I’ll end up deciding between changing old references to match the new structure (if it’s a matter of fixing my own entries) or learning .htaccess tricks. I doubt it’ll be all that important, though — it isn’t like I get all that much traffic.
raul Said,
February 25, 2007 @ 12:34 pm
Just curious as to whether you had Akismet installed with Moveable Type? (I use Akismet on Moveable Type and have had almost no spam since installation).
Eric Said,
February 25, 2007 @ 1:52 pm
I didn’t have Akismet installed. Until tim mentioned it above I didn’t know there was an MT version.