Migratory Notes….

Wheee, I’m well and truly on the migratory trail, despite the not infrequent dash of misgiving. I must admit that I’ve made one concession to the misgiving part - the old Movable Type blog continues to live and breath in a thinly veiled part of the vast digital multiverse. Hmmm, that’s the third time in as many days that I’ve used that term, does this imply another intellectual masturbatory trip, we ask!

This blog is now powered by WordPress and not Movable Type. ‘Like that matters!’ do I hear you ask? Well, yes and no. It seems to be a little easier and faster to tinker around with ‘look n feel’ on WP as compared to MT. For the most part, this has to do with the huge amount of volunteer development that’s available for WP. But the MT community is pretty strong too. So for now, I really don’t have too much to say about the rationale for the switch; plus, I’d been on MT for over 2-years now and that’s a fair bit of context….. I’ve been able to ’skin’ the site much, much faster, but I still have some cribs about how its suddenly become a challenge to just tinker with my page elements.

I’m not a code-slinger, so I found the MT-code a little easier to tackle vis-a-vis PHP, which is what I suddenly face a lot of. And I’m kinda intimidated already - I’ve managed to break the site many times already, always due to some syntax error. Will I learn enough of PHP soon enough to get by? We’ll see.

So why the shift? Let up will you??? No? Hmmmmm, thought so! Well, the only reason is that I want to be able to create sub-sites or micro-sites (or micro-blogs in this case), which have to do with my areas of interest. Won’t the categories portion deliver exactly that??

No, its not managing to achieve that (or I’ve been too ignorant to figure out!) I’ve been meaning to create a section on Micro-finance for instance. Another on Kerala mural paintings. A third on practical / home remedies, fixes & tips… and so on. Each with a slightly personal look n feel, navigation and bells & whistles. But still managed from one central console, so to say. And I was just not getting anywhere on this score. And I’m backing a hunch that this might be done more easily in WP; given how smooth the migration was, particularly in comparison with the MT-upgrade (that had me licking my wounds for some days, I assure you) I’m hoping that I’m on the right track.

Most of the functionality of the older site has been recreated; I’ve dropped the month listing, since the new slider feature allows for far more ‘interesting’ jumping around. I’ve yet to bring back my blog and site list, and get back to posting….

Its just that I’ve been fooling around under the hood…. and its been interesting enough to have become time-consuming. So hey, if you’re a newbie (as I am too actually) and trying to chose between Movable Type and WordPress, I’d point you to the latter - for sheer ease of use. It gets you up and posting on a somewhat personalized blog much faster. Any downsides so far? There’s one for sure - I’ve had to use FTP/shell far more than I ever had to with MT; every theme, plugin and widget for WP has to be put into the by this route. And this could be scary, if like me, you had to use a command-shell. Ah well, no pain no gain and all that, lets see what new muscles I’m going to develop.

Ta for now, will become my old regular irregular self soon. And have a lovely weekend youse!