One of the things that I reassessed at the end of the year was the likelihood that resuming development on my personal blogging software would be anywhere near the top of my priority list. With the answer being a resounding no, and the advances that WordPress 2.7 has made (particularly w/ the admin interface), it made sense to finally stop putting it off and switch over.

Whipping up a direct database import was pretty straightforward and didn’t take long (less than 80 lines all-told), and I was able to import all 4,149 entries (and over 900 revisions) without a hiccup. I also imported additional the legacy urls and IDs as additional metadata. I ported over my current look into a template, and added my legacy code handling so even my most ancient blogger and other static-based posts should continue to resolve (the 404 checks to see files resolve in legacy.randomfoo.net and I have a few additional redirects that mostly seamlessly forward along the most ancient requests).

The last thing on my plate is figuring out how to best migrate Disqus comments to the new posts. I think that I’ll need to modify the Disqus WP plugin to pull from the legacy_id when applicable. Until then, I’m just redirecting old posts to the old system.

Also, sorry for those subscribing to my feeds for the potential dupe-age. Old posts retain their previous guids, so I guess it’s up to your feedreader to see how it’ll handle the transition…

A few interesting numbers:

• 2554 posts in Blogger starting in 2000 (not counting my older FA410 class blog from ’99)
• 1256 posts via text files in vim starting in 2003
• 1300 posts in a custom db-backed system starting in mid-2004

So, anyone have recommendations on indispensable plugins?