Last October, Twitter changed their API and broke the Movable Type plugin I’d been using to pull in my tweets as posts. Back then, there was no way to download an archive of your tweets, and I tend to use Twitter as a microblogging platform, anyway, intentionally wanting these small bits of my life to be integrated in with the larger bits.
So, this was big.
Once the plugin author admitted that he would not be spending any time in the foreseeable future to update the plugin (it was a lot of rework, and a change to the entire backend), I decided that it was time to make the plunge I’d been thinking about for years.
It was time to convert to WordPress.
It’s amazing how much I was able to get done on a single project when I put it as a priority. I completed the migration in nine nights, after my son went to bed (and before I turned into a pumpkin). I cataloged the steps I took, with the intention of writing an in-depth blog post about how I converted my MT site to WP… but, of course, I never did write that post. Now, looking back on my notes from a year ago, I can still remember and appreciate the overall accomplishments and frustrations, but I’m not entirely sure what I meant with all the specific-yet-vague details.
Some things are still broken, and some functionality from the old site still missing. (I was on MT for just over eight years, after all, and had plenty of time to customize my pages and archives.) I have a list in my to-do app of choice of about ten site-related modifications and tweaks I’d like to make — but, right now, the site works, and making tweaks to something that works is not a priority. Not when I have less than two hours every night to divide between cleaning, blogging, and generally unwinding from the day. Someday I’ll move my genealogy page off of my old MT stylesheet and incorporate it into my WP installation. Someday I’ll get my photo gallery back up, complete with thumbnails, searchable by camera or by camera type. But that’s not going to happen for a while.
Right now, my priority — blog-wise, anyway — is to just get the major events recorded. I use this as my personal public journal, an extension of the diaries and journals I’ve kept since I was seven years old, and I often search it after the fact to remember when things happened. (Sometimes I wish my longhand journals were indexed, too — and that I’d actually written the important things as they happened, instead of skipping past events like divorce, death, moves, and instead coming back to journaling after life had settled back down.)
At any rate, we’re unlikely to see any major changes here in the next year, design-wise… but maybe i can at least fix what’s broken, like missing categories that didn’t port over, or minor design tweaks that probably no one will notice but me.
And maybe I can make writing a priority again.