I’m thinking about starting over.

Posted on August 12, 2006, under General.

It’s been on my mind for awhile, but I’m seriously considering dropping my current blog engine and starting over in WordPress.


I started this blog using Nucleus back in January, 2005. I remember researching the different blogging platforms, and there were a ton to choose from. Moveable Type was pretty popular, but I don’t remember too many others really standing apart back then. I’m glad I didn’t choose Moveable Type, because it went to a pay model not too long after. I’m pro-capitalism for sure – I like my paycheck, but my blog content isn’t necessarily worth shelling out money for a blog engine.

I chose Nucleus because of the technology and the active development. That, and it readily supported multiple blogs. However, development seems to be dropping off, and if I want support for a feature that is core to other platforms, I have to look at a 3rd party plug-in that may or may not be well written and may or may not be supported in the future. I started to write a plugin, and had some questions on the API, but didn’t receive a response. So that wasn’t real motivating.

Also, Nucleus announced a theme contest last year, with real cash-value prizes. I was excited to see what the community might come up with, but was also beginning to think it might be a measure of the level of community support it had. Well, the first bad sign was that the contest deadline was pushed out six months. I didn’t take that as a sign that people were clammering over developing for Nucleus. Then, once the contest was over, I was definitely disappointed. There were a few designs, but only a few, and a lot of the designs were by the same handful of people. Hrmm..

So with Nucleus I’m sensing a dying community and support dropping off unless someone comes in there and shakes things up.

All that being said, I’m looking at WordPress. Several people I respect use WordPress, and it seems to have really good community support.

The challenges:

  • Import existing content into WordPress. I think I’m going to have to do this by importing via a really large RSS feed.
  • Redirect popular post URLs to their new URL in WordPress. For instance, my post on resetting the passwords in SharePoint gets a lot of search engine hits. I can do this via mod_rewrite on Apache.

The good:

  • I can 404 some posts that I decided I didn’t want out there. For instance, some family ones that I decided I wanted to keep more private still exist in the Google search index because the pages do not return a 404 error. They just show post not found.
  • RSS feeds for categories and even comments, which I think is pretty cool.
  • Better theme support. I’ve seen some cool things done with WordPress themes.
  • I’ll look at implementing friendly URLs this time around.

The bad:

  • I will lose comments. This isn’t horrible, but not something I’m excited about.
  • I will lose embedded images and video. I can still go back and add these again, so not a huge loss.
  • Since WordPress is more mainstream, more people are targeting it for security problems.