I had a couple hours of free time today and decided to sit down to convert my old blog to WordPress (finally). This has been a really long time coming, as I’ve been using the same hand-rolled blog publishing system for the past five (!) years of writing online.
Since I have about a thousand or so entries on this thing, it seemed unlikely that I could do the move by hand, so I wrote a short PHP script to massage all the old entries (including images, categorization and the all-important comments) into a more Wordpress-like shape. It took about half an hour to figure it all out, then another half-hour to recreate my blog’s look using Wordpress’s templating system. (While I was at it, I decided to use a slightly different color palette. Still nice and puke-oriented of course.)
As I write this the whole thing seems fairly stable. The only issues are the main navigation at the top of the blog (not quite as important on a blog site, so it’s not a dealbreaker) and the fact that all of my incoming links are now dead. I’ve gotta find time to write a 301 Redirect or (more likely, since I’m lazy) a 404 catch-all.