techno.blog("Dion")

Wow, it has been years since I touched my blog software. I was running MT 2.x. I showed that to an ex-MT employee and he laughed heartily. I wasn’t the only one though, Cedric was a fellow 2.x-er, and why not.

Who has the time to tinker with their blog!

Well, having flights to and from London gave me the kick in the goolies that I needed to actually upgrade. I am a bit fan of Wordpress. I hacked it to kingdom come on Seeking Alpha, and Ajaxian is a proud to be powered by it.

The fact that on a given day I would be posting in Moveable Type, Wordpress, and Blogger, was a little insane. Each have their differences. Holy context switching.

Migrating the blog was mainly a pain due to wanting to be able to keep the old URLs working. I could follow past importers and that worked pretty well, but of course you need to tweak thins for your setup. This meant that a few Perl scripts later to do some data munging on the export files, and I was in business. A few more .htaccess tweaks to make sure that old images and other files were still accessible, and the new blog was the current blog.

Since I was on a platform that I knew, I could quickly tweak it to add a few pieces of functionality that I have wanted forever:

• Show my status updates right here. I grabbed StatusPress and quickly butchered it to do the right thing for me wanting a single status update on the top of the page
• Activity Stream: These days I have a link blog, videos on YouTube, photos on Flickr, etc etc… like everyone else. The top right corner aggregates all of the data (using a Yahoo! Pipe) in one place. Shortly it will show you where the data is coming from… but not yet)
• CommentQ: I threw up my plugin that asks silly questions before allowing a comment. So, comments are back, and hopefully not spammers

I have a slew of other features I would like to add, but that may take another few years…. or maybe just until my next flight to London, which is in a couple of months to speak at the @mediaAjax conference.