atom thoughts

So, I finally got around to converting this site off of Typo. All permalinks should still work. I did not migrate the comments over however.

I chose Typo because I had bought into the hype like everyone else and thought since I am actively working with Rails I should be using a blog written in Rails. Well, since then the creator of Typo has moved on from the project and even his blog is now using Mephisto. But the main reason I migrated from Typo is it just doesn’t have the usability and features of a more mature blogging engine such as WordPress. It was almost painful to write a post in.

At first I spent a few days converting this blog to Mephisto to try to keep it in the Rails family only to find out that the memory requirements for Mephisto are roughly 47MB per fcgi! I think that may have more to do with Rails 1.2 than with Mephisto though but I haven’t spent any time digging in. In any case, beware if you are on a shared host as Mephisto currently is not supported in that environment.

The conversion process was a snap thanks to WordPress’s RSS importer. The rough steps I took were:

1. Modify Typo’s xml_controller to increase the maximum number of articles in the articles feed. It just has to be greater than the number of posts you have.
2. Log into your WordPress admin section and click Import -> RSS.
3. To keep your links the same, you will need to change your WordPress Options -> Permalinks to Date and name based. Then to allow the “articles” portion of Typo urls, you can add this to the generated .htaccess file in the root of your WordPress install:

   RewriteBase /articles
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
   RewriteRule articles/(.*) /index.php/$1 [L]