Red Leopard

I finally made the jump from moveable type to wordpress. The hardest step was porting the old posts. Whereas I created posts using UTF-8 encoded characters, moveable type did a dumb convert of the characters into Latin-1 when storing them MySQL. Since the path out of the database and to the page was a reverse process, when viewing pages the characters would reappear as UTF-8.

However, when exporting the data from moveable type, the round-trip was broken. The characters in MySQL were not really proper Latin-1 characters. None of the recommended processes I found through google worked for me. I’ve had to deal with this problem at work last year. The memory of that pain makes me flinch.

In the end, I exported the data from moveable type, ran iconv to convert to UTF-8 and manually edited the resulting file to correct the mistakes.

I chose not to import all my images into each and every post. I simply link to them.

I still don’t have my template set up properly. There’s a few bits and pieces from the moveable type templates I’d like to port. But overall, it went smoothly. Five minutes to install and configure wordpress/mysql. Twenty minutes to find a template I liked. Ten minutes tweaking the CSS to fit my old content into the new template (images were wider than the default content width). Three hours mucking with the Latin-1::UTF-8 problem.

Now to get pagination, rss/atom feeds, … working.