Hedging my bets

I learned a new word recently - "slammed," your state of being when you have no time for almost anything except work, a state which seems to go on for ever. Can't yet find this definition in any dictionary, but it's quite an apt description of that state of being. Hence, no activity in this blog for nearly a month.

Re my experiments with Movable Type and WordPress, I spent a lot of time late last month in setting up the two blogs (MT here and WP here) as part of my learning process about each platform. As I've commented in this blog, I plan to use one of them as my new platform for my new primary blog - "NevOn 2.0" - which will be hosted on my own hosted server rather than through TypePad as a hosting service.

Even though I've not had time this past month to physically do much with those experimental blogs, I have been thinking a lot about my next steps.

This is what's in my mind right now - I will use WordPress as my primary blog platform.

My limited experience so far shows me very clearly that WordPress is much easier to use than Movable Type. So for my primary blog, I want a platform that enables me to achieve most of what I want to do, especially with look and feel, without constant recourse to help files or asking others for help. I read a good review in eWeek about WordPress.

Yet I still want to get to know Movable Type more, especially as in my perception it is more likely to be the platform that you'd want to go with if you were considering blogging within the enterprise, in particular with multiple blogs and/or multiple authors. As I talk to a lot of companies about corporate blogging, it's important to me that I can speak from a position of hands-on experience when discussing platforms. Then there are the plans announced by Six Apart last week on Project Comet, their vision for the future of blogs and platforms. Very interesting indeed.

So I'm going to hedge my bets.

What I'm thinking is that I'll develop my primary blog on WordPress and use Movable Type for secondary blogs like this one, NevOn Experimental (so maybe it was a subconscious reason why I switched styles yesterday on my MT experimental blog to match the style of this blog).

A major point still to decide - do I import all the content from my main blog to the new WordPress one, or not? Same with this blog to the MT one. Or do I leave them where they are and in effect start again with the new blogs? I've got a paid TypePad subscription through until the end of July 2006 so leaving them here isn't a problem for at least another 10 months.

The other thing, too, is the nevon.net domain name. That's currently mapped to both these TypePad blogs. I will re-map the domain to the new blog meaning that both of these TypePad blogs will revert to the underlying TypePad addresses. That will no doubt affect anyone who's bookmarked any specific blog posts, but I can't see how to avoid that.

I need to make a firm decision sooner rather than later, and then just do it...

Comments

[Andrew Marritt]

re your moving platform comments I went through a similar case when I moved from Blogger to Wordpress a few months ago. There will be some differences because you are using your own demain whilst I was using the blogger format. Here is how I managed it:

I copied the posts across to WP using the import tool. This was pretty easy.

The comments were harder as I was using haloscan. I didn't manage to find a good solution. For the most recent active posts I added a '10 people commented on this' with a link. Checking back some of those comments have disappeared.

I was using feedburner to publish my feed so there was no need to get users to change.

I left the blogger posts online. It took about 3 months before I got more traffic to the new site as much is search-engine driven. As I was using an old domain Google / Yahoo etc were cataloguing the new site from the start.

I put a note in the title of the blogger site that it was the old site with a link to the new one

I searched to see who had linked to me on their blogroll and sent these people an email asking them to change the link.

My only thought on your situation is that of old links. Unless you keep both blogs running with the same URLs you will kill all the old links.

Hope that helps,

Andrew