Recently in Personal Category

The Projects page on my site has been under 'development' for quite some time now. Actually, it was more neglected than 'under development'. Well, I'm pleased to announce that it IS actually under development and nearing completion. Several projects are listed with overviews and screenshots of each, and as always, if you have a project that you feel I might be interested in, please contact me.

WordPress filled a huge gap in the marketplace when Six Apart, the makers of Movable Type, decided to screw with their licensing. At the time, Movable Type was numero uno in the blogesphere. Researching articles with the keywords 'migrate', 'wordpress', 'movable type' returns thousands of results of people switching from WordPress to Movable Type, but very few results the other way around.

As of late, WordPress has been annoying the hell out of me. Ever since the 'upgrade' to version 2.3, I've had nothing but issues with WordPress. My number one complaint was my theme was magically possessed. On blog entries, it would sometimes show the correct number of comments, sometimes not. Navigating to the entry page would show the comments, and still the number of comments would be wrong. Perhaps this was a 'feature' of version 2.3. In any case, it was quite annoying and caused me to reevaluate my blogging software.

Another issue I had was with WP-Cache. WordPress in a shared hosting environment such as mine, is quite slow. WP-Cache sped things up a bit, but only marginally. Perhaps it would of done a better job if my site was getting hit all the time - but it wasn't.

I evaluated Expression Engine and Movable Type 4. I decided to go with Movable Type because Six Apart has since changed their licensing and have made available a free version for personal use as well as an open source version. All of which are compatible with their larger commercial offering.

Being somewhat shallow, one of the major selling points for me was the interface. Movable Type is pretty, it's sexy and it's completely functional. Think of it as a Lamborghini that's as easy to drive as a Honda.

The decision of ditching WordPress in favor of Movable Type was taken very seriously. I knew in advance that the plugin support, availability of themes, etc was far superior in the land of WordPress and almost desert-like for Movable Type. Even with these obstacles, I chose my migration path.

The actual migration was quite painless. Movable Type was able to import all of my uploads, entries and comments. The only thing I had to do was figure out the templating system. At first, it made absolutely no sense at all. After a few hours of experimentation, I found it to be quite logical. It was just very different from WordPress, so my learning curve was a bit steeper.

So for all of you celebrating the release of WordPress 2.5, I'm happy for you. May it work better for you than it did for me.

That's right freaks, the 60th anniversary of the 1947 UFO crash in Roswell, NM is coming up. It takes place over the July 4th holiday weekend and goes for 4 days. Visit the Roswell UFO Festival website for more information. The city is expecting over 50,000 people from around the world to attend this years event. I started a thread over at Mysterious Universe for anyone who'd like to get together and do some activities.