Switched to WordPress and Installed Confluence

30 May 2005

I’ve decided to go out on a limb here and make the switch from MovableType to WordPress. Not really a slight against MovableType, but I’ve been meaning to upgrade my blogging software for sometime and liked the theme support available with WordPress.

The migration was rather straight forward. My hosting company, 1&1, provided everything I needed to make the switch. MovableType made it easy to export my existing blog posts & comments and WordPress provided support out of the box for importing the data. I’ve noticed there are some odd paragraph breaks that have occured as an artifact of the export & import, I’m not about to manually go through and fix all them so my web readers will have to live with it.

I did actually experiment with a bunch of different themes, but came back to stock Kubrick with a replaced header image. I like the looks of it and who knows, might stick with it for awhile. The built-in theme support makes it trivial to tweak the blogs look and feel.

Lastly, I installed the flickrRSS plug-in which allowed me to easier place thumbnail photographs in my sidebar. So far I’m happy with the functionality provided by WordPress. I will be experimenting with the anti-spam tools because I’m being hit with an ever increasing amount of comment spam. It’s gotten to the point where I actually have gotten into the habit of disabling comments.

The only other thing of note I did this evening was install a Personal edition of Confluence. Confluence, the professional J2EE wiki, is a knowledge management tool designed to make it easy for a team to share information with each other, and with the world. I thought I’d give Confluence a try since they just came out a perpetually free personal license. We use JIRA at work for bug tracking and have had nothing but praise for it. Before Confluence, I’d been using the ruby instiki. It was a relatively lightweight wiki that worked well on my laptop. I’ve installed Confluence on my linux server so I may still have use for instiki for simple note taking on this portable.

That’s it, that’s all.