Legal Commentary

A Post About Blog Software

By Professor University of Miami School of Law

Should I upgrade? Change platforms? Once every great while, I think I should either update to a more current version of MovableType from my increasingly archaic 2.64, or attempt the even more herculean task of converting to Wordpress. (MT is up to version 5.02!)

Due to the large number of customizations and plugins I've used (not least my dependence on Textile 2 for text formatting, and the somewhat quirky file structure I settled on some week in '03 or '04 when it was Google-friendly), either task would be a real struggle. The whole look of the thing would have to change — which would in fact be the reason to do it. Plus I'd get lots of shiny new toys to play with (aka modern plugins). The version of MT I run now isn't just a dead end, it's a dinosaur in Internet terms. And it has some annoying technical limitations.

If I were going to undertake the upgrade project, I'd either have to do it this summer — a unique moment when I'm not actually supposed to working, so I have the time — or pay someone (who? how to find them?) too much money to do it for me. And given my erratic skills in this area, even I tried to do it, it's not obvious I could import old blog posts into the new system, especially if I switched to Wordpress, which works quite differently. The idea of having an “old” and “new” blog isn't all that appealing, but maybe there's no choice. I certainly could set up a new one from scratch and lock down the old one.

Then again, WP is a bigger target for hackers; old versions of MT have some small security through obscurity, and due to their dwindling user base.

Advice from the knowledgeable always welcome. And comments about the aesthetics also appreciated: to my eye, discourse.net's design — if you can dignify it with that name — looks not just crowded but increasingly stogy. Is that:

(a) charming and quaint, or
(b) annoying as hell, or
(c) not important: content is king, never mind the design, or
(d) irrelevant given almost everyone uses the RSS feed to read blogs these days, or
(e) other (explain).

Let me know.

Full post as published by Discourse.net on June 01, 2010 (boomark / email).