[update] – for those of you who’ve arrived here via my RSS feeds – the summary is: I moved my website to a new server and made a variety of architectural changes while so doing. Use the links on this page to update your RSS reader subscriptions – going forward the old feeds will remain static and simply point at this weblog entry. So that you have them handy, the feeds are:

RSS – http://www.metamusing.net/weblog/?feed=rss2
Atom – http://www.metamusing.net/weblog/?feed=atom

[end of update]

Complete in the sense that the old box is powered down, the content is all migrated, and my domains have been pointed over to the new server. Much remains to be done. In terms of what I did exactly:

I migrated my movabletype weblog data in its entirety to wordpress. I cannot believe how smoothly this went, it is a credit to the wordpress developers, huge kudos to them.

I migrated over my photo gallery, 700 MB of photos, tarred up. This also went super smooth. I did not yet migrate to Gallery 2, I’m still using the 1.5 series of their software for now, though upgrading to 2.0 is next on the list after I clean up the remaining 404’s, put some of my old content back in place (like, say, the homepage), and settle on a template for wordpress.

I (finally) got a publicly accesible wiki installed, something I have been procrastinating about for about 2 years, which is here. If you want an account, let me know and I’ll hook you up. Right now it’s wide open, we’ll see if hackers manage to deface my site before I get around to finishing off the configuration and locking it down. I have an interesting project in mind for the wiki which I will bring to light as soon as things have settled down.

I have officially migrated to http://www.metamusing.net as the domain of this site. The old domain is pointing at the new machine, but all the software tools (ie the wiki, weblog and gallery) are configured for metamusing. This is in part because I am going to go public with this site, again as soon as things have settled, and in part because daves-place is mostly a legacy – I’ve owned metamusing for over 2 years now, and the transition to the new box was the excuse I needed to finally move over to my ‘real’ address. This means you should update your bookmarks accordingly.

A few words on how I ended up with WordPress: I’ve been intending to upgrade this site for at least a year and a half. The old daves-place box is over 4 years old, and it was well used when I got it and has been running its operating system on the same drive for the whole time I’ve had it. The box has been literally running 24×7 for over 4 years. The only time it came down was when I moved from Maine to NY last summer, when it was down for about a month. To say I was living on borrowed time was an understatement. I do have to give credit to abit though – the board is a dual cpu BP6 running two celerons. The cpu fans haven’t worked in years, yet the thing runs like clockwork. I haven’t decided what I am going to do with it yet, if anyone has an interest in it or an interesting idea for it, speak up.

Anyway as soon as I settled into life in NY I started experimenting with toolsets. I wanted a couple of things out of an upgrade – an integrated wiki and better image management. After some early experiments I preliminarily settled on Blog::CMS which bundles a set of tools into the base weblog engine. But after some time working with it I concluded it had a set of issues – inferior image gallery and a clunky weblog engine being my chief complaints. At the time wordpress 1.5 was out and I had hated the previous version, but when 1.5 shipped I clicked with it, and started using it at work as an experiment. Gallery 2 also shipped during this timeframe and I basically worked out that I could use Gallery 2 as an image database with WordPress and Mediawiki using Gallery 2 as their image storage system, which both provided me with what I had been looking for and provided for a relatively seamless transition, and (aside from me not yet updating to gallery 2) that’s where I am at today.

I did consider one other system – Typo, the ruby on rails powered weblog engine. I’ve mentioned here repeatedly how awesome Ruby on Rails is, and it was very tempting to move to a system based on it. But the bottom line is it is early days for Ruby on Rails, despite how quickly they’ve grown so popular. There isn’t a robust ruby image gallery system, nor is there the breadth of developer support surrounding Typo that you find with WordPress. So, for now, it’s WordPress, with an eye on RoR as they evolve. Will it be another 4 years before I switch? And if it is, it will be really interesting to see what this marketplace looks like as compared to now.

To close, a historical footnote – this weblog has migrated through a variety of platforms, though most of you are only familiar with its movabletype incarnation. I started with Trellix of all things, WAY back when, at least 7 years ago. Then I moved to the still available Greymatter for a time. Next came the Movabletype based system that lasted for four years, until today’s migration to WordPress. WordPress is the first time where the previous incarnation’s content migrated into the new system, though interestingly while archiving things on the old server I found a tarball of all the old Greymatter content, which I might port over to WordPress depending on what all is in there (it’s been 5-6 years!).

In terms of hardware, this is the third computer to host my web content. I started with a creaky pIII running windows, then moved to red hat linux after I discovered I’d been hacked by benevolant intruders- they left me a note and a collection of video codecs after raiding my anime collection, assuming incorrectly that I was trying to play the files on my server (I wasn’t, I was sharing them with my friends, back when anime wasn’t playing on the cartoon network). Then I moved to the Abit BP6 dual cpu celeron I mentioned above, and today I moved onto a Biostar small form factor IDEQ 210 running the latest ubuntu beta, which I am also using as a desktop system (and really enjoying, I might add. If you IM me in the evening these days, chances are you’re talking to my ubuntu linux box). I should also mention that I came within a hair’s breadth of moving all of this over to a mac mini, and sometimes I wonder if I shouldn’t have, but career wise keeping it on linux was the better move since it helps me keep my skills sharp.