The Perils of Switching Blog Platforms
I've noticed recently a few high-profile bloggers - Om Malik and Michael Arrington - have switched to a new blogging platform (Wordpress). Both have experienced technical woes and problems in moving their blogs but unlike the rest of us, they seem to have a small army of technical help and/or tech-savvy friends to work out the bugs. Their troubles have put the spotlight on how difficult it is to switch “horses” in mid-stream, and how it could be time for blog publishing standards to be established to make it easier to migrate from one platform to another - assuming TypePad, Blogger, Wordpress, et al have any interest making this happen. I considered moving from Blogware but passed on the idea after thinking about issues such as amending blogroll information and access to archived posts. It's not that Blogware isn't performing well but there is no harm in exploring whether there's something better out there.
December 31st, 2005 at 5:20 pm
I think Dave Winer was writing about the need for standards too, after Typepad had server problems and a bunch of peoples' blogs went down for an extended period. He and others were talking about how it would be good to have a way of backing up archived posts and comments so that you could easily move servers in the event of a disruption — which is one of the benefits of running your own server as opposed to a hosted solution.
January 1st, 2006 at 11:01 am
There's the saying, if it not broken, don't fix it. I've thought about switching from TypePad and in the end the hassle doesn't equal the reason to change.
January 1st, 2006 at 12:35 pm
I'm just looking at moving from Movable Type to Wordpress myself. I currently have it staged on my workstation, but have to write some PHP code to handle what used to be done by a specialized MT plugin.
My big concern is making sure all the archived links point to the new site. I've done it once before when I moved from numbered posts to a more descriptive name.
Sean
January 1st, 2006 at 7:29 pm
Hi Mark. I think a lot of people are moving to WordPress or just raving about it is because of the simplicity and the functionality. I have been using WordPress for over a year now and there is a plugin for absolutely anything and everything you would want to do. It's just unbelievable.
Plus one of the biggest reasons I moved from Blogger to WordPress was that I was in control of my destiny. I had the database and I could do whatever I wanted to with it and not rely on Blogger or TypePad or Blogware to offer some functionality or rely on their networks/servers.