first post in movable type

(Warning: geektalk ahead.)
If you’re wondering why I’ve been quiet the last few days, I’ve been busy moving the software that runs this site over from Greymatter to Movable Type. It’s been a laborious switch.
Not because of any problems with MT, which is elegantly assembled and easy to use (once you get past an install a newbie might find threatening). Mena and Ben have put together a terrific program I’d recommend to anyone. My problems arose (a) because I had to hack a way to get my comments imported, since they weren’t Greymatter-native but used dotComments instead, and (b) because I used GM’s connected-files features for everything on crabwalk.com except the main blog, each page of which had to be manually transported to the new templates.
But it’s all done now. Please poke around and tell me if you see anything that looks wrong (or, more accurately, more wrong than it usually does). The only changes should be: (a) having the permalink date stamp and the comments tag on a separate line (MT, for all of its blessings, insists on wrapping posts in a P tag if you want it to convert line breaks, which means there’s no way to have other tags on the same line as the post itself unless you’re willing to manually change every P tag in all of your past posts); (b) a less attractive pop-up comments window (since to my knowledge MT can’t put comments in alternating-color table cells, at least not without some code hacking I’m not willing to get into); and (c) switching the archives from the /archives/ directory to /archive/ (I kept the old GM archives there to avoid link-rot).

6 thoughts on “first post in movable type”

  1. Hmmm. I would like to know how you did the DotComments thing. I’m supposedly migrating to Movable Type sometime this millennium. Being able to bring my comments would smash one more of my excuses for procrastination.

  2. So are you going to come over and help me do the big switch? It’s already installed on the server so it should be too hard.

  3. I think you’d have to offer quite a bit in return for that sort of in-home technical support.

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