Welcome to Linkstew point oh. After years of maintaining my own blogging software, it's finally time to let that dream die. Besides reinventing the wheel, I was missing out on newfangled blog features like trackbacks, multiple feed formats, and posting APIs.
When I started online journaling way back in high school, it was just some static html. This grew into a series server side includes, which later became some php templates. There was a moment when I realized "hey, this is one of those 'buhlog' things... I should see what tools other people are using." So I checked out some site called "blogger" I'd been hearing about, but at that point blogger was only a few months old, and I was already doing things blogger couldn't (and it turns out wouldn't do for years to come) like categories. Later I evaluated Greymatter (remember that thing?) and later still I evaluated Moveable Type, but each time there was something I didn't like.
So I went through a few big code iterations, and learned how to do a lot of things the hard way, and did some neat stuff, and it was probably a good learning exercise. But, Linkstew's code has long been neglected, and I was never going to get around to doing everything I wanted to the site. Heck, I figured that out with In Passing years ago.
So without giving it too much thought, I decided to switch to WordPress. I've had a basic migration of Linkstew in WordPress sitting around for a few months, and yeah, there were things I didn't like about it, but last night I decided to just bite the bullet and get it over with. My primary interfaces to Linkstew were highly polished to suit my taste over the course of years, so it's unreasonable to expect that a tool like WordPress is going to be exactly what I was hoping for. Just because "I don't like the category management interface" and "I don't like PHP" is no reason to miss out on everything that a community supported open source software package has to offer.
Besides, maybe I can write a plugin to do more tag-like category management and share it for everyone's benefit.
There are almost certainly broken bits. If you notice anything, let me know. Here's a list of what I know is wrong:
- The picture blog was last in the migration. I'm going to investigate ways to avoid reinventing this wheel before I add it back.
The rss feed and the /noid/ links should still work, but I couldn't get mod_rewrite to work for those URLs, and instead I made some small 301 redirect scripts to handle each case.- I fixed mod_rewrite so these now return 200s, but later I plan to switch them back to being 301s.- The current layout is transitional. I don't intend to recreate the old design, but I have ideas for what I want to do that I didn't want to hold up the migration for.
Links to categories with spaces would appear to be broken.- There's something wrong with quotes in the RSS feed.