Moved from Wordpress to Flatpress

My website has gone through several iterations over the years (static, Blosxom, Seredipity, Wordpress).

There’s an old post detailing some of it: Install a weblog

I’m not sure how I missed posting about the change from Seredipity to Wordpress later but I’ve been running Wordpress for a few years now. I got tired of fighting with Wordpress and thought about changing for a while now. Every so often a plugin would screw up, throw blank pages and then starts the troubleshooting session. Then there’s the hammering of the server with bruteforce login attempts and cleaning up after hackers exploited the built-in theme editor (why is it even there?). It’s definitely been quite the love/hate relationship with Wordpress for me. I just wanted something simpler for this site, I still think Wordpress can be a great solution if you’re willing to work with it.

I went back to look at Blosxom (along variations like PyBlosxom, etc.). I saw several options like Octopress out there for people that were tired of dealing with the Wordpress (and other kitchen sink solutions) and the overhead in databases, security issues, etc. While the overwhelming number of themes and plugins of Wordpress were nice, they were also part of its issues.

I found Flatpress and loved how streamlined it was. There’s no database to worry about since it’s all stored in text files. It’s lean while still having all the basics needed. I familiarized myself with it and found a theme I liked (just added my header from the old site). I started copying and pasting posts from the Wordpress site. I had all the posts over in short time (there’s only a couple dozen posts to move). There’s some examples of scripts going in either direction out there. I couldn’t really tell you how well they worked. I’d probably have tried them if I had hundreds (or more) posts to convert.

I just needed to tweak the picture sizes to fit the theme width to be done. I was so happy with the results, I went ahead and made it the live site. I just needed to move a couple things over that were outside the Wordpress install and create a symlink to keep from breaking the picture path. I went back and edited out the wp-content out the path on the posts to move forward. I’m looking at doing some 301 redirects for the search engines to find the moves but am not seeing too many 404 on pages so I might just leave it alone.

I think it’s going to work great but I’ll just run it on my personal site for now to tweak and geek around for a while. I’ll consider moving the family site later if nothing else pops up with Flatpress. I doubt it will since it’s already doing everything I need. There might be a couple things to try (Twitter post integration, gallery integration, etc.) with the new site but no deal breakers since I’m happy with it the way it is at the moment.

Yes, I realize there’s a couple posts from ‘07 with broken pictures. They’ve actually been broken for 4 or 5 years when I combined strog.org and dale.shrauger.com. I wish you’d told me about it back then when I still had backups from then and could have restored it. Now I’ll just have to recreate them or just let it be.

*edit*
Fixed the pictures. Well, figured out one, found a close one and copied the FreeBSD screenshot which was almost identical.

*edit again*
Put Redirect 301 (permanent moved) from the old URLs to the new URLs by hand (again, not *too bad* with a handful of posts) so the webcrawlers/bots can find the posts since they are my largest audience (hah).