Basically, this is what I did:

1. Set up a new site with DreamHost.
2. One-click installed WordPress from DreamHost’s nifty one-click application interface.
3. Exported my old MT data on the old server
4. Finished installing WordPress on the new server
5. Imported all old MT entries into WP.
6. Set up permalinks in WP with the cruft-free architecture I like.
7. Changed my MT archive templates, so they have redirect code in them for each archive type to point to the new WP url structure, as much as possible (MT dirify uses “_” instead of “-” to seperate words, so that sort of sucked).
8. Rebuilt all old MT archives and downloaded to my Powerbook
9. Used BBEdit’s powerful find and replace to batch find “_” and replace with “-”
10. Uploaded all old pages at /weblog/archives/ so that old files are in the right place to redirect people to new urls
11. Added a few lines to my .htaccess file, so that the old files work (I was using .htaccess to remove the .php from the end of those old urls).
12. Modified the WP templates a little to add the Google AdSense Code (will do more modifying later, to tweak the templates and styles exactly how I want them.
13. Installed WP Hashcash, a most excellennt plugin that Paul Beard recommended to kill comment spam in it’s tracks.

Overall, I’m more than pleased with WordPress, and am not looking back on Movable Type for a while… I just want to be an end-user folks… and with WP, I can be that end-user. It also helps that I know a little about PHP, and not a damned thing about PERL.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^$

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} ^POST$

RewriteRule ^/mt/mt-comments.cgi – [F]

From Jeremy: Using mod_rewrite against stupid comment spam bots… (by Jeremy Zawodny).

You rock Jeremy. Thanks.

After the initial account set up, I noticed in Dreamhost’s “Goodies” menu item, a WordPress Install option, and I figured “what the hell?” Took all of 2 minutes to install WP. Twice. Wow!

So I installed WordPress on DubMiller.com and JohnEngler.com.

I’m still looking for a phpNuke to WordPress or MT script, if anyone has one, or wants to work on one. I’d be happy to beta test, if that’s required.

Lastly, if you’re looking for a host, I can definitely recommend Dreamhost. For two reasons. One, it literally took 30 minutes to get a fantastic hosting plan up and running for two domains, with all email users added and a good open-source CMS tool installed. Second, they pay referral fees for people that sign up based on you recommending them. Wow. Now that’s classy. So, if you do look into them, use this link: Dreamhost referral link, or tell them you’re signing up thanks to a referral from johnengler.com.

Oh, and any wordpress tips are greatly appreciated. I haven’t decided to switch everything over to WP yet, but will think about it as I learn more about the tool.

Last night I backed up my website, and will be doing the upgrade either today, or later this week (just maybe over the weekend, but more than likely I’ll be doing it earlier than that).

Why the upgrade you might ask after being satisfied with MT 2.64 for so long? Well, I’m starting a new project, and I need the subcategories feature, and don’t want to just use another plugin on 2.64, and I’m hoping I get a little performance boost out of MT 3.1. I was a donor back when I first started using MT, so I’ll get a little price break, if I decide to pay for 3.1 after the upgrade.

If things look funky around here for a bit, it’s because I screwed something up, and I’m apologizing for that in advance

I foung one post in the MT Support forums, PHPNuke to MT, Converting from PHPNuke to MT, but it’s pretty sparse on actual help.

Anyone got a script that’ll take data out of PHPNuke and import it into MT?

I have to applaud Six Apart for charging for MT 3.0, but the pricing structure is pretty complicated. I would have preferred a $100 price tag for a personal edition with no limits and $500 for a commercial edition with limits, but that’s just my preference. It’s tough to set prices properly when rolling out new products. You never want to price things too cheaply on launch, because it’s really tough to increase prices (only publishers that sell advertising space seem to be able to do this well) and you don’t want to price too high, because then you’re afraid you’ll lose sales to the competition.

The reason I’d have preferred only two pricing options is because I’ve already donated back with MT version 2.1 or so, and I’ve loyally upgraded since then, and two options make the decision sooo much easier for the consumer. In addition, the MT pricing page should really offer TypePad as an option for people, because Six Apart really offers three real options to customers and they might miss out by not promoting that service on the MT pricing pages…

Just my thoughts. MovableType is well worth paying for, but now I have to figure out what level I want to pay for, what’s included in each level and what’s not, and what my wallet can afford.

Until I figure all of that out, I’m sticking with 2.661. I know it. It works, and I’m actually pretty happy with it.

update: It looks like Six Apart is rethinking the licensing terms and possibly the pricing for MovableType 3.0.

On it, I’ll post links that I think are interesting enough to read, but either don’t have the time or energy, or need, to write anything in depth about them.

An RSS feed is here, and the templates are here for those wishing to do the same thing on their own MT weblog.

I’m using the MT Excerpt field to hold comments about the link that I want to add to it, and using the MT Body field to hold the URL of the link… I might change it up a bit in the future, to add more context, but for now, I think that’s plenty.

The linkblog also shows up in searches now, so you can search from the linkblog homepage, or this weblog homepage… either will get you the same results.

How do I add an ‘edit this page’ button to a Movable Type weblog?

Very cool. Thanks Keith.

I subscribe to her full feed because I’d like to read her site whenever it’s updated, and… I really don’t have the capacity or desire to remember to visit her site every day to see if it’s updated, and… I really like to read everything she writes… but often don’t have time to click-thru to her website from my RSS reader, and then go read her site, then return to my RSS reader to read the rest of the feeds I’m subscribed to…

So, I’m very thankful to Angie for offering her entire feed… and, if you need MT templates to offer your readers multiple feeds, you can steal my RSS templates.

I’d also make a plea that more traditional publishers start publishing RSS feeds, and, if they can include advertising in the feeds (to pay for them) go right ahead, just save me time and I’ll read their content more often.

• RSS 1.0 Full Feed, with complete HTML markup and comments. [template]
• RSS 1.0 Full Feed, with complete HTML markup but without comments. [template]
• RSS 1.0 Full Feed, without HTML markup and no comments (basically my work-safe RSS feed… contains no images) [template]
• RDF 2.0 feed with full complete HTML markup and no comments [template]
• RSS 1.0 comments feed [template]

So, while this post isn’t a tutorial on “how to create your own Full Post RSS feed, I hope it can give you some insight into how I did it, and if you want to do it yourself, you’re free to steal the code pieces it requires from me…

Also, you can read some old (possibly outdated) posts on this same subject here:

• Unsanity: RDF Comments
• RSS Feed Validation
• RDF Feeds Updated [outdated]

Brent gets props for giving me the right answer first… turns out the URL for pinging weblogs.com shouldn’t have a trailing slash after it… I have no idea if I screwed that up, or if it was part of the default MT install and Dave changed it… Thanks Brent.

Beth gets props for getting me to add the manual ping form to my bookmarks bar, just in case weblogs.com gets finicky again.

This is a good error message:

Ping ‘http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2′ failed: Ping error: Thanks for the ping, however we can only accept one ping every half-hour. It’s cool that you’re updating so often, however, if I may be so bold as to offer some advice — take a break, you’ll enjoy

Thanks all.

Ping ‘http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2/’ failed: HTTP error: 404 Not Found

Anyone know?

If you have a server that you can control, then you should download the Storable.pm source, and then follow the instructions for how to install it. If you don’t know what you’re doing, ask someone knowledgeable about your server set up to install it for you. (I know better than to try and teach people about how to install stuff on platforms I know little to nothing about).

The slick part about it being installed is that you can’t login to it unless you know how to sign into my MT installation… Very Slick!

A reader of Lockerknome wrote this:

If RSS just becomes another polluted source of noise, it will be no better than email or the Web are right now. If an RSS feed is going to have ads interspersed with content, itís not saving me time. What made RSS feeds unique was that they gave me what I asked for and nothing was wasted. If all companies are publishing to RSS is advertisement-laden crap, we end up with nothing more than a poorly functioning version of the same thing we have now.

Chris Pirillo answers that the beauty of RSS is that it’s a pull medium (I’m paraphrasing here) and in that it’s a pull medium, it’s too easy for us as users to unsubscribe from the feed if we don’t like it, but I think that’s shirking the issue. What if we really, really like the content, but hate the advertising? What if the advertising becomes too overpowering because of a greedy sales manager at the publishing company for the users? Sure, the publisher will loose readers, but how can the publisher balance advertisements and reader’s needs, wants, and desires?

I’ve long advocated advertising in RSS (though I don’t do it here because I’m too lazy to figure it out, and I have nothing to sell) as long as the advertising is targeted and relevant to the audience of the RSS feed. For example, a website about Sci-fi books might offer one ad in a feed of 10 news items that changes once a week for a new book – that would be targeted and relevant.

Another example might be Gawker offering local New York businesses a weekly sponsorship of their RSS feed only to local businesses that offer something to local readers in New York, and to earn the opportunity to sponsor the feed, those businesses must truly offer something of value to New York readers that will drive traffic to their store: A supermarket offering free milk if you buy $10 of crap at their store, or J&R offering a free CF card if you come buy something at their down-town store on a Saturday where they’re having an HP marketing event… something like that is targeted and relevant and offers value to the reader.

The ad should only show up in the RSS feed as ‘new’ once per week or month, depending on the audience that it’s targeted to reach. And yes, I agree, weekly ‘new’ would probably work best for most advertisers.

Adam Kalsey shows how to put a weekly ad in his SimpleLinks RSS feed that’s produced with MovableType with this article.

Amazon does a good job of offering their content through RSS feeds, and I’d argue that this is a complete feed system that’s truly just advertising as content.

And lastly, Ken Schaefer provides his comments on advertisements in RSS feeds in this post on his weblog.

The premise was to create a cookie-crumb trail URL scheme so that anyone could read a story:

http://www.inluminent.com/weblog/archives/2003/06/14/acuna/

and by deleting the directory (or crawling up the directory structure), they could read all of the stories for that day:

http://www.inluminent.com/weblog/archives/2003/06/14/

or month:

http://www.inluminent.com/weblog/archives/2003/06/

or, that if they wanted to they could browse the category archives more easily:

http://www.inluminent.com/weblog/archives/categories/leadership_management/
http://www.inluminent.com/weblog/archives/categories/marketing_advertising/
though I still need to build the master category page that should reside at http://www.inluminent.com/weblog/archives/categories/

After reading this article against file extensions on the web, I also didn’t want people to have to know that I was using PHP, though I don’t mind them knowing, so I really wanted everything to look like it was sitting in a directory (even if it’s really a file, or it’s really sitting in its own directory). It should be transparent to the user, and still Google friendly, and user friendly… so:

Here are the steps I used to get my URLs straight, and not lose any traffic from old links, or search engines (GoogleJuice) that haven’t updated their links (stolen largely from Olivier and improved in a few places)

1. With the individual entry path still set at <$MTEntryTitle dirify=”1″$>, replaced the individual entry template to:

<?php
$NewUrl = "<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/%d/"$><$MTEntryTitle dirify="1"$>/";
$NewUrl = "http://www.inluminent.com/weblog/archives/" . $NewUrl;
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: $NewUrl");
exit();
?>

This is so that all of the old inbound links will get redirected to the proper place which will be created in a few steps.

2. Rebuilt individual entries. (This took a bit of time, but not too long. As Olivier’s example states, at this point, old links aren’t working anymore, but we’ll fix that in a few steps)

3. Changed the individual entry path (in MT’s archiving settings) to:
<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/%d/"$><$MTEntryTitle dirify="1"$>.php

Note: This is different than Olivier’s approach, as I didn’t want to have a whole lot of individual directories to maintain in the filesystem, but rather one directory per day in each month containing however many posts were created that day.

Also changed the daily archive’s entry path:
<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/%d/index.php"$>

the monthly archive’s path:
<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/index.php"$>

and the category archive’s path:
categories/<$MTCategoryLabel dirify="1"$>.php

4. Replaced the individual entry template with my old template.

5. Rebuilt individual entries. (At this point, old links almost work again because the redirects set up in step 1 now point to directories much like the files created in step 5, but not quite… I’ll fix that in a minute with a mod_rewrite trick I learned… read on.)

6. Added the following lines to my .htaccess file to redirect monthly and category archives pages which were easy to handle through regexp thanks to their previous structure.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule weblog/archives/200([0-9])_([0-9])([0-9])_(.*)(\.php)$
http://www.inluminent.com/weblog/archives/200$1/$2$3/$4 [R=301]
RewriteRule weblog/archives/200([0-9])_(.*)(\.php)$
http://www.inluminent.com/weblog/archives/200$1/$2/ [R=301]
RewriteRule weblog/archives/cat_(.*)(\.php)$
http://www.inluminent.com/weblog/archives/categories/$1/ [R=301,L]

(formating note: each line in the .htaccess file starts with “RewriteRule”, ie. there aren’t any breaks in the code when it’s in the real file on the server)

7. Added the following rule (taken from Keith’s “no extensions” entry) so that category pages (which are technically category_name.php) can be delivered as directories (among other page types)

RewriteRule ^([^.]+[^/])$ $1/ [R=permanent,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.php -f
RewriteRule ^(.+[^/]) $1.php

8. Added some code to all of the internal links (depending on which type there were that replaced the ‘.php’ or ‘index.php’ with ‘/’ (as appropriate) so that all links on the site go to the correct place:

<?php echo str_replace("index.php","","<$MTArchiveLink$>"); ?>
<?php echo str_replace(".php","/","<$MTEntryLink$>"); ?>

Oh, and if you’re looking for a decent mod_rewrite primer, here’s one at Kuro5hin.

One last thing, Olivier, since you’re stuck on IIS as your dev platform of choice, you’re probably going to be looking ISAPI_rewrite which I pointed to back in November of ’02.

This IP address: 200.72.26.98 has been spamming my referrer logs…

they’ve been banned.

MT Medic [via Pat Berry]

Interesting graph on SARS

Let’s Make a Cell-Phone Deal – I’ve done this. It works. More from ArsTechnica.

Working with Forms in PHP, Part 1 and Part 2. Great information on PHP and forms handling.

Great tutorial on Cookies and PHP.

Famous Fonts [via angiemckaig.com]

Upsell More [from XPlane]

Closing the Sale [from XPlane]

Increasing Customer Loyalty [from Xplane]

The Anatomy of a Style Sheet (brought to you at 37,000 feet courtesy of Net News Wire Pro’s caching of RDF feeds – Thanks Brent) Looks like a great start to a useful CSS tutorial… and something I can really use the help on learning.

Automating iPhoto 2 with AppleScript

Power Keys in Jaguar

Common Style Mistakes, Part 1

Papers written by Googlers

So Much for Economic Principle :: Apple Computer’s persistence defies the law of increasing returns.

A article on software development and the business side of it: Risky Business part 1, and part 2

The simple steps were to install Brad Choate’s excellent MTSQL plugin.

Then use Adam’s code on my individual entry templates, and viola, I now have Related Entries for people coming from Google looking for information. Interestingly, we recently started manually linking “related posts” on MarketingFix, and I just added Adam’s code and Brad’s plugin to MarketingFix as well, and Adam’s code pulls the same stories that we’re pulling manually for the most part. Pretty smart Adam. Thanks Adam.

I’ve set up a mailing list, so that I can do this, but haven’t found the right combination of existing hacks to get what I want done truly done.

If anyone’s interested in building something for me, I’d love to talk to you about the concepts. In the meantime, here are some more MT Hacking Links:

Entry Category: Movable Type Advanced

MT Plugin Directory

MT Extensions

David Raynes, who provides plenty of MT categories on his blog.

emptypages

Scripts & Such

Phil’s MT Hacks Page (the old URL moved on me)

Brad Choate’s MT tips