I’ve finally given up maintaining my old custom blogging system and, after several hours of messing around with SQL statements, have converted over to WordPress. All the old entries and comments have been moved across and the design is still the same for the most part, although I haven’t finished editing the templates for all the pages so there may still be one or two places where it doesn’t look quite right. The old URLs should still work normally, with one or two exceptions where I’ve put in permanent redirects which, if you have an intelligent client (this might not apply to some feed reading software), should use the new URL directly from now on.
The main reason for switching is that I simply don’t have time to keep maintaining the code base of the custom system that I wrote about two years ago. Apart from anything else I still didn’t have an admin system (everything was managed through phpMyAdmin), which was becoming a real pain, plus there were some WordPress plugins that I wanted to use. Also, I was planning on moving my site to a better host (off my ADSL line and onto one of my Bytemark Virtual Machines) anyway so it seemed sensible to do both things at the same time.
I’m afraid LiveJournal is a bit stupid and can’t handle syndicated feeds very well, so my last six or seven entries will have reappeared on everyone’s friends list if they’re subscribed to pwaring_feed. I don’t know why this happens and more to the point why it hasn’t been fixed yet, but I’ve found (courtesy of Tom) a plugin that will let me cross-post from here to my proper LiveJournal account so hopefully the syndicated account will become unnecessary after a while.
removes feed from friends list to save getting everything twice, and to stop a bunch of old stuff showing up
Much better.
I’ve done the same – LiveJournal’s handling of feeds is incredibly poor and it doesn’t deal with 301 redirects properly. I’ve got rid of the feed now so hopefully it will automatically be deleted from LiveJournal in time.
Ah, only about three years too late 😉
Better late than never. 😉
I note we’ve been deleted from the sidebar.
They should be back now, I’m hoping to do links through the blogroll system within WordPress instead of the static list I have at the moment but I think that will have to wait until I’ve got a few minutes to look at how that piece of the templating code works.