Phew! The exhausting cutover is done.
I've spent the past couple of weeks moving my boy's blog over from Blogger to Movable Type. The big hold out for me was two things - easy blogging with a photo, and mobile blogging
The last time I checked for a good photo blogging tool (aside from Picasa, which is fantastic but only posts to Blogger), I couldn't find anything that worked. Finally, though, I stumbled on Anconia Rocketpost (which I am writing this blog in). You can create a resized image with a thumbnail, and drag and drop just works. So whaaa-hooo, blogging a photo problem solved. I of course once again forgot that Movable Type has a different password for using the API than logging in, so wasted a ton of time trying to figure out why I couldn't publish using the tool. Six Apart say this for security, I say it is asinine and non-intuitive - if my password can be hacked, my API password can be hacked. Give me a break.
The other issue was moblogging - Blogger supports it, Movable Type does but you have to be able to set stuff up on the host, which Yahoo doesn't support. Yahoo is now supporting Movable Type as part of its small business hosting, but they didn't add mobile blogging (after all, who would want to do that???). I found a solution with Flcker, which supports mobile blogging to any blog and ironically is owned by Yahoo. The downside is that you can't choose the sizes, they force them on you - either 240 wide or 500 wide, but not 320 or 400, the sizes I like to use in my blog. 500 resized to 320 looks like crap, so I am using 240 and then updating the photo once I get home. Less than ideal, but it gives me moblogging.
I used the same blog transfer template that I used to move this blog into Movable Type, and aside from forgetting about the fact that you have to use a tool that doesn't save both CR and LF characters after each line (what a stupid requirement of Movable Type importing, by the way), I had no hiccups. I should read all my instructions, I suppose.
So the cutover is now complete - My Boy's Blog is now running on Movable Type. It is way cool now - I have all the pages as PHP, which allowed me to do a user-select color scheme, a dynamic blog calendar, a photo strip, and real-time latest photo & blog links. I'll blog some of that PHP code later. Also there is a lot more flexibility with the kinds of archives I can have - daily, monthly, total. And search is supported out of the box. I totally dig it.
The other excitement was cutting over to the Yahoo! Movable Type implementation - but that is for a later blog, I have to go for P.T. for my torn biceps tendon...
Comments