CHICAGO CARLESS

(July 12, 2008)–I gave CHICAGO CARLESS a sweeping renovation over the July 4th, 2008 holiday weekend and ensuing week.  It was time––the last big change was when I moved the blog over from Blogger.com in fall 2005.  Since that time, I had been using Movable Type to scribe CARLESS.  I started with MT 3.2 and then I stayed there.

I’ve always wanted to develop the blog into as robust a site as possible, with better content and features and improved interactivity.  But older versions of Movable Type software made sitewide changes difficult, and Movable Type the company never offered users of older software a truly easy way to upgrade without spending many hours in blog-code hell rebuilding everything.

Along the way I mused about migrating to Wordpress, Movable Type’s main competition.  I had read alot about its ease of use and open-source nature, which allowed for a lot of user-created system plugins.  But making that move would have taken an even longer time to recreate the site and make sure old links didn’t break.

What finally broke was my patience. June 2008 was the three-year anniversary of CHICAGO CARLESS.  My life has changed in many ways since 2005 and I wanted to update the entire blog to reflect my journey.  The limitations of Movable Type 3.2 weren’t going to let that happen in any easy way.  I turned to Movable Type 4.0, a new version of the software that offered the main thing I had been wanting: the ability to apply site-wide updates in minutes instead of hours.

I studied up for hours and meticulously followed Movable Type’s upgrade instructions.  Then I watched as  MT 4.0 injured my database and broke its own control panel.

And then I downlowaded Wordpress 2.5 and the world was happy again.  Bluebirds sang outside my window and deer frolicked below as I made the decision to dump Movable Type, consigned myself to however long the migration would take, and rebuilt the renewed CHICAGO CARLESS.

After 50 hours of work (and a big thank you to my ADHD powers of hyperfocus), the blog and its features are now spiffier than ever, with more on the way as I continue to explore what Wordpress can do.  I am loving the widgets and instant side-wide changes that I can apply.  Some of you might be loving that you can now read the entry comments (which a quirk in MT 3.2 had denied for some of you for more than a year).

Most of all, I am loving that I finally feel freed and supported by my blogging platform of choice, rather than limited and hampered by it. So thank you, Wordpress–this is the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

I will continue to post updates about site changes here.  If anyone has a suggestion or a response about the current site, please feel free to add a comment below.

And thanks for reading.

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Current Issues:

• The monthly archive headers are broken.  I’ve kludged this with a generic “Monthly Archives” header.  I suspect it’s either a Wordpress 2.5 issue or a problem with my theme, Cutline 3-column split.  If anyone has a solution, I’m all ears.
• Permanent redirects from the old blog site are also not working (internal links have been rewritten and still work). This is because of code that Wordpress 2.5 inserts on the .htaccess page to make “pretty URLs” happen. Again, if anyone knows the solution, please let me know.
• The FeedBurner Feed Flares may not be working at the bottom of each post yet.  They should be working in the RSS feed, itself.  I still need to determine the correct positioning for the code in the new Loop on the Wordpress 2.5 templates. Fixed!
  
• I am planning to dust off my old AdSense account and roll it out at long last. So in the next few weeks, ads will appear for the first time on the blog.  We’ll see how it goes.

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