So, after the last upgrade and the frustrations that came with it, I decided to ask around for good blogging software. The main contenders I had in mind were WordPress and Movable Type. Most of the people who replied talked wonders about WordPress, but I decided to try both. WordPress’ installation was ridiculously easy (I’m talking about installing my own copy, not opening a blog in wordpress.com obviously) and I had a working blog pretty quickly. Also, at least the first impression of the UI is that it’s very slick and easy to use. It shows maturity. Movable Type was easy enough to install, although I did have some problems (mostly due to my own stupidity, but still). The first impression was that Movable Type was much “heavier” and maybe a bit too much for a single, personal blog. So I decided to go for WordPress, which was the one that I had been recommended by most people anyway.

So, the first thing I had to do was exporting the content from Typo’s HCoder so I could import into WordPress. I quickly found some script for Typo that would export in WordPress’ format, for easy import. It worked very well, although I did a problem with the tags: they were treated as normal categories, so I ended up with many categories and no tags (and a huge, horrible, impossible to navigate sidebar with dozens of categories). I started to look around, and I couldn’t find a spec for the wxr format. Maybe I was naive thinking that there would be one, but hey. In any case, eventually I figured out that I had to change the:

<category>rants</category>

to

<category domain="tag">rants</category>

for the tags. The categories had to stay as they were, but luckily for me, all uppercase names were categories, and all lowercase names were tags, so I could do the trick with vim with:

:%s/<category>\([a-z]\)/<category domain="tag">\1/

After that, I could import back all the content, but then I had the next hurdle: the style of the blog. I didn’t mind if the design wasn’t exactly the same, but I was used to the old one and didn’t want to change it too much, so I used the excellent Opera Dragonfly to inspect the styles of the old blog, and I slowly copied the most interesting values (colours and font sizes mostly) to the equivalent CSS classes in the WordPress theme. I’m happy with the result, so I think I’ll leave it as it is for now.

Last, but not least, I wanted to try to keep the old URLs working. I did two things for this:

1. I added some URL rewrites to keep Typo’s feed URLs working. However, the Atom ones also redirect to the RSS ones, I wonder if that’ll be a problem.
2. I changed the default permalink settings in WordPress so they matched what I had in Typo. Hopefully almost all blog posts will actually keep the URL and the migration to WordPress won’t be very traumatic. You tell me if I’ve broken anything ;-)

One thing that I don’t like about WordPress’ blog editor is that apparently it doesn’t allow you to write in some Wiki-like syntax, like Markdown or Textile. I know Movable Type does have it, but several other things made me stick with WordPress and I’m happy overall. At least for now ;-)

It took me a while, mostly because of stupid Ruby deployment nonsense that makes me even more tired of Ruby as a language for production usage, than I already was. Oh well.

One of the most important new features for me in this release was the article preview, which doesn't seem to work. Or maybe it does, but then support for writing blog posts in Textile seems like it was dropped. Suggestions for other blogging platforms that aren't a pain to upgrade because of the language dependencies, supports writing in some wiki-like syntax (e.g. Textile or Markdown) and generally works well are very welcome.

It seems that everything is in place and working now, but if you see anything misbehaving, please give me a shout and I'll try to fix.

• I had to install a ridiculous amount of dependencies, sometimes to go from version 1.1.1 to 1.1.3 of some module. I really wonder if Typo 5.2 really needs those versions.
• When trying to upgrade, it seemed to hang in this line: Backing up to /var/www/virtual/hcoder.org/db/backup/backup-20090223-1843.yml. It turns out, it didn’t really hang, it just takes a good while (and yeah, the file stays at 0 bytes for a long time too)
• I had some permission issues that I had to fix (when upgrading, it tried to modify/copy some files, and it couldn’t)
• When applying the migrations, it died with a really strange error message. It turns out, my version of Rubygems was too old ????

While writing this first post, I see some improvements in the admin interface, although I still can’t see any kind of “preview”. I hope it helps me with my struggle with spam, at least :-/

I have just upgraded Typo. It was slightly traumatic, because at first the blog broke horribly and I couldn’t see anything other than errors 500. To be fair, the change was quite big, because it included also an upgrade to Rails 2 (I was using some older Typo that used Rails 1.2.x), so everything worked better than expected.

I could login as admin, and change preferences and whatnot, and the only thing that was broken was the public view of the blog. I had a look at the logs, and it complained about not being able to find some template for the sidebars. I was very confused, and didn’t know where to starting looking for this. So, obviously, I asked “Señor Google”. He didn’t tell me that much, but someone left me the following hint: if you comment out the call to the helper `render_sidebars` (in the active theme code) solved the problem…. at the price of not having sidebars of course.

So I decided to connect a Ruby/Rails console to the production database, and have a look at the Sidebar model. The summary of what I did is this:

>> Sidebar.find(:all, :order => ‘active_position ASC’).
map {|s| s.active_position}
=> [0, 0, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 4]
>> Sidebar.find(:all, :order => ‘active_position ASC’).
map {|s| s.type}
=> [nil, “CategorySidebar”, nil, “ArchivesSidebar”, nil,
“TagSidebar”, “StaticSidebar”, “XmlSidebar”]
>> Sidebar.find(:all, :order => ‘active_position ASC’).
find_all {|s| s.type.nil?}.size
=> 3
>> Sidebar.find(:all, :order => ‘active_position ASC’).
find_all {|s| s.type.nil?}.each {|s| s.destroy}
=> [#<Sidebar id: 1, active_position: 0, config: {"empty"=>false, “count”=>true}, staged_position: nil, type: nil>,
#<Sidebar id: 2, active_position: 1, config: {"title"=>"Links", “body”=>"…"}, staged_position: nil, type: nil>,
#<Sidebar id: 3, active_position: 2, config: {"format"=>"rss20", “trackbacks”=>true, “comments”=>true, “articles”=>true}, staged_position: nil, type: nil>]
>> Sidebar.find(:all, :order => ‘active_position ASC’).find_all {|s| s.type.nil?}.size
=> 0

So, the problem is that there were some (severely broken) leftovers of the upgrade. I just removed them, and everything started working again. Phew!