Nothing is quite as much fun as seeing this on my screen:

Done copying data from Berkeley DB to your SQL database! All went well.

Okay, there are things that are slightly more fun, but it’s always pleasing when a conversion goes well. This is over at Cyber Dyke Blog by the way, where I am using a commercially-licensed version of Movable Type. (I switched to WP over here so I could hide certain posts, not because I don’t like MT!) For some reason the control panel on the cydyblog.net domain, DirectAdmin, wouldn’t let me delete the existing cydyblog_wordpress database (I had used WP there for about two days) and wouldn’t let me do a DROP DATABASE in PHPMyAdmin. So I just dropped all the tables from that database and used its connection information for the MT configuration. The conversion took a while, but at the end I got that lovely line you see above, so everything went well! It’s a little odd seeing tables with the prefix mt_ in a database called cydyblog_wordpress but I don’t intend to actually go into there much anyway, so it doesn’t matter.

I love being a blog geek!

I finally managed to get MtProtect working thanks to some help from Levi. KC had pointed out that some of my entries would be better off hidden behind some kind of protection, so I chose MtProtect but had some problems with the installation. I filed a support ticket and the response was good enough for me to solve the problem, except for a headers already sent error. For right now I’m using password protection to hide entries, although MtProtect does also give the option to protect entries from all but TypeKey users on a specified list, and those users of course must be logged in.

There are a lot of other projects I want to get done in relation to my site. I want to switch from categories to tags (globally), clean up my code again, unclutter the sidebar…lots of things to do.

I have updated my Movable Type installation to 3.17, the latest available. I also installed the new Tags plugin, and I’m thinking of going back through 2600+ entries to tag everything. I’m not sure how I feel about transitioning from categories to tags, so for now I’m going to leave both intact. This means that a Tags category has now been established, and all tags will become child subcategories within the Tags category. If I decide to move from categories to tags altogether, I think I can just move the children into the top-level and be done with it. I never did use keywords; perhaps I’ll do better with tags. (I do notice that the alternative entry template isn’t compatible with my QuickPost bookmarklet as I currently have it established, though.)

Reading over what I’ve been writing about Wordpress, I realize that it sounds like I’m converting completely. This is not the case: my personal website, journal.amanita.net, is still MT and I plan to keep it that way for quite a while. I greatly prefer MT’s templating system over WP’s - I don’t want to have to rely on others to write my design for me; although most of the skins on my MT site are written by others, I have tweaked the code and I can read the code. Wordpress uses PHP for everything, and I’m not familiar enough with it to be comfortable working with it. I expect to use my diet journal to be helpful in learning PHP, and potentially down the road I could end up being familiar with it enough to switch, but that won’t happen for a long time yet.

Besides, MT is my friend. I’ve been using it for almost three years and I still enjoy using it. I don’t want to switch yet. Wordpress is great, and I’m using it for my diet journal rather than just starting a second blog in my MT installation, but I like MT and I’m sticking with it.

Due to receiving hundreds of comment spam messages with random URLs (i.e., cannot be managed by MT-Blacklist), I have turned off commenting for unregistered visitors. This means that you must log in to TypeKey to comment. If you don’t already have a TypeKey account, go get one; it’s pretty painless. Sign up for a Gravatar while you’re at it, too! Hopefully requiring registration will be a temporary measure; I hate to think of the comments I’ll lose while the site is set up this way. But unless some top-notch Bayesian filtering makes it into MT-Blacklist or MT itself…I’m not sure what to do.