While I liked my Presstopia blog fine and knew how to do a few customizations to it, I didn't have categories. There was no one page where I could go and find all the entries about script attacks or Exchange 12. I was also curious about updates in Six Apart's Movable Type 3.2, since I haven't done an MT install since about MT 1.6.something, along with comment assassin. With MT 3.2, all comments must be approved and I get emails about them.
By no means is this move based on Microsoft vs. Open-Source whatever. I am simply choosing an available tool, just like with anything else. It's not like MT is free either if I have more than one author.
The migration went OK -- I had to write a simple VBscript to format my old entries to a format MT could understand. My old blog, Presstopia was fine but didn't have any specific export capabilities other than Atom and RSS. Why MT can't import directly from RSS or Atom is beyond me. Why Presstopia can't shoot out all entries from RSS is a mystery -- unless I get source code access. Thus I wrote another SQL connect string and some VBScript to format the date properly. I have a lot to learn about date formatting from SQL 2000 in ASP. And about dot.Net.
Installing MT wasn't that bad, except Image::Magick is AFU on Fedora Core 4. It won't make because some kind of language error that makes variables into foreign phrases, leaving me with thousands of error messages. I like NetPBM better, anyway. And MySQL permissions are funny. Localhost is NOT included in ANY in the host permissions section. D'oh.
Now I can compose within the blog itself, rather than saving in Word or something first because my session would time out before I hit the "post" button. MT is slower on the edit response time but reading is faster, since it's static HTML rather than a VB call to SQL. And my content is no longer held hostage to a system with limited export capabilities.
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