bengt.org was accumulating roughly 1000 spam comments a day.  while they were queued for approval (and auto-deleted after 7 days), any actual comments would have been buried in the onslaught.  i intend to post more frequently, but touching doing so on moveable type was just a reminder of how janky my instance had become.

after 45 minutes of fiddling with captcha and openid plugins, i started looking for a cleaner solution.  i’ve been with moveable type since may of 2004, the pre-3.0 days, and upgraded several times, so bitrot had definately set in.  hack upon hack and left a fragile pile of php, perl, and really bad css.  any of the less elegant patches were non-starters, as they conflicted with my previous hacks.  i pretty quickly realized a clean install (app, database, themes, and plugins) was the only real solution… so, while i’m reinstalling, i might as well consider my options, right?  it’s possible sixapart has taken their eye off moveable type while they’ve “diversified” in vox, typepad, and blogs.com (not to mention the brief affair with livejournal).  whatever the cause, moveable type has flagged.

as i mentioned, my previous experience with wordpress was several years ago and the early versions left me underwhelmed.  somewhere in the interim, it’s become a full blown content management system, with a plugin and theme architecture that makes it pretty compelling.  i exported my posts and piloted a moveable type install on an unused domain (i own several that are typically just redirects to bengt.org, including the puke.net and monkeylove.org).  while some of my glee is clearly neophilism, i was very happy with what i found.

i was able to setup the blog, import my old moveable type posts, add some pretty workable anti-spam measures, find a canned theme i liked, modify it, and integrate my flickr photostream within an hour or so.  after another couple hours of fiddling with permalinks (including some fairly nasty mod_rewrite hackery) and kicking the tires, i was satisfied it’s a relationship i was willing to commit to.

i can’t lie down/sleep too soon after eating or drinking.  (see the life posts for a full description of why.  in short, i have a hiatal hernia and bad acid reflux.)  on vacation with not much else to do, i pulled the trigger last late night.  the most noticable effect is that rss readers refetched my last 10 posts.  a minor, but annoying side effect of differing rss schema.  i had figured out a way to avoid it, but not without propogating some of my foul moveable type hacks to wordpress, a sin to which i was unwilling to fall victim.