Migrating

I migrated all the old content from my old Drupal installation, using an export script that saved the Drupal nodes and comments into a text file that MT imports directly. I ended up using the Python version of the script posted by a commenter by the name of "Charles S", with a few modifications. The main change I made was to add a status filter to the query to exclude spam comments (making up over 90% of the thousands of entries).

Setup

Once I imported all the old content, I had to tidy up a few things, but it went surprisingly well. I added a few custom templates and widgets, which was a good learning experience to figure out how to customize things. I'm impressed with how powerful and flexible it is. I added a "badge" for Twitter updates, and another one for Flickr.

I tend to post a lot of source code snippets in the code I write, and I really need to publish nice-looking code with syntax-highlighting. After much searching and reading, I settled on SyntaxHighlighter, which uses JavaScript to highlight code on the page. You put the source in a textarea with a special ID, and it will dynamically transform the code when displayed. It's very nice, and easy to install and use.

Comments

I had a huge problem with spam on the old blog, and Drupal's facilities for dealing with spam made it almost impossible to manage. I haven't enabled anonymous comments here yet, but OpenID is now supported in addition to a simple registration process. I'm hoping that people will use OpenID for a low-friction way of posting comments.

Since all the major free email providers (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) now support OpenID to some degree, I'm keen to see this gaining more traction.

Posting

The built-in web-based post editor in MT seems very powerful, and supports a WYSIWYG mode as well as various markup types. It seems to provide all the features you'd want, though the edit/preview/edit cycle is a little slow. While I do use the built-in editor, I tend to write when I have both ideas and time, which often does not coincide with having connectivity.

To solve this problem, I upgraded to the latest version of MarsEdit, so I can write and edit posts while offline. It's a great Mac-based blogging client, with some great new features, including Flickr support and image handling.

Rather than dynamically producing content like other CMS packages, MT generates static files for your blog entries and pages. This has the advantage of being very fast and efficient, but to perform the "publish" stage of generating the static output can sometimes take a while (depending on various factors). Still, I think the pros outweigh the cons, and it's a very slick package.

Categories and Tagging

I had only used basic tagging before, and MT adds categories and keywords, which is nice and flexible but requires some thought for a sensible ontology. It will take a while to figure out a good structure for the content to come, but I now see I have many ways or organising the content.

Ahead

MT has the combination of a powerful blogging platform, and the ability to publish static pages and other assets, and thus addresses nearly all my needs. I'll probably end up using Trac for publishing code for some of the projects I'm working on.

If anyone is interested in any more detail about the MovableType setup, drop me a note in the comments. I'd especially like to hear from someone commenting using OpenId.