Migrating from MovableType to WordPress

Well, I just imported every entry from my MovableType blog.
Categories preserved, all posts, all comments, even images look ok.
I screwed something up with the character encoding, so accents (i.e. México) look funny. I may or may not fix that, since most of the blog is in English anyway.

I still have to fix the template, to show the del.icio.us links, my own external links (time to clean some of up) and some other minor things such as the randomly-selected blog subtitle (did you ever even notice that?).

Why ditch Movable Type?
a) It’s not GPL. So I can use my version all I want but they made their license more restrictive so I don’t want to upgrade.
b) It’s Perl. As a work buddy of mine (McKay Bradford) eloquently put it, “Perl is a write-only language”.
c) I like PHP. WordPress is PHP, is GPL’d, and is prettier to administer too.
d) Moi made a cool plugin for WordPress. I’m looking forward to use that.
e) There are no, or very little, MovableType templates out there. I’m no web designer so I need all the help I can get.

I’ve also learned that there are quite a few drawbacks to the migration:

a) Lots of work to get it all up and running again. Hey at least all the images are showing up ok.
b) All the permanent links to entries and archives changed. There are many clever ways to get them working again, but… it seems like too much trouble. Not many link to my website, at least to the internal pages, other than the 1984 video and the M&Ms entries. To them, I apologize.

Other than that, things are going smoothly.

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