ITauthor

I've been talking about revamping ITauthor.com for about two years now and, until now, done nothing about it. I finally decided that I've got to aim for simplicity. Originally, I saw ITauthor.com as a full-blown website mainly made up of articles about software and technical writing. Those articles never materialised because I just never had the time. Also, I never really got on with Plone. The whole architecture of Plone is very poor and I hated Python from the word go. I just didn't get on with Python at all. Give me Perl any day. I looked around at alternatives and very nearly went with Joomla, but it's more than I need and the setup and redesign I know I would get mired in would prevent me generating content, just like Plone did. I need something plain and simple, where other people have done most of the work for me. That's where WordPress comes in. Originally I'd thought of it as just blog software. But I also need to replace my old MovableType setup, which has always annoyed me because it's incredibly slow, difficult to redesign and (the version I'm using, at any rate) is full of usability issues. I've been using WordPress for over a year now for a private blog, so I know what it's like to use. I installed the latest version a couple of nights back and I've just spent my lunch break importing all my MovableType posts into this WordPress blog. It was pretty straightforward, with one caveat. Basically all you do is use MovableType's export facility (from the admin page) to export everything to one big text file, you then import this into WordPress from WordPress's admin page. The caveat is that it won't work if the file is too big. Mine consisted of posts going back to 2003 and when I tried to import it I just got a blank page. You've got to chop the file up. I chopped it up into 7 files and it worked fine. Note: several how-to pages on this talk about editing a .php file on the server. In WordPress 2 you don't need to do this - just use the Import tab in the admin section. The import wasn't flawless (of course). I lost most of the formatting, some of which I'll need to reinstate to make posts readable. The images appeared fine but they reference the images directory in the MovableType area of my web server so, to keep a logical structure, I'm going to have to move these and change the href values. But it's a start. I feel like I'm a big step closer to a simpler but more useful ITauthor.com.