A month or two ago, I tried to post a recipe to the recipe list Richard and I (well, mostly I) maintain, only to get a series of errors. All the existing blog entries were still visible on the site, but I could not edit them, nor post anything new. The recipe list was created using a much older version of Moveable Type, and we just never got around to upgrading it. Richard couldn’t figure out how to fix the errors, and I really didn’t want to mess with starting from scratch with a brand new installation of MT. So he suggested I give WordPress a try.

Richard’s been using WordPress for a year or so now, but I’ve been hesitant to switch before now because I knew it used php, and I do not ‘speak’ php. However, we found a nice, basic theme to use for the recipe site, and he installed it and I manually ported in all the recipes (because not only could I not edit or post, I could also no longer export the older entries into a nice, compact file for later use. Wince), and then I started actually looking around WordPress, and looking at the actual templates themselves and much to my surprise I discovered that the amount of code I really can’t ‘read’ is far smaller than I had expected. Plus, this system is *nice*.

It’s probably no surprise that shortly after I got the recipe site up and running on its brand new system, it wasn’t long before I asked Richard to give me my own instance of WordPress to poke and prod and turn into my very own. I had to get his help on a lot of the set up, and the documentation for the php tags WordPress uses is not always very useful for someone who doesn’t know php, but what I couldn’t figure out on my own, Richard did for me. I imported all the entries since 2003 from Moveable Type, and then by some miracle, I stumbled across an export file of all the entries that were composed in Greymatter (pretty much all of 2001 and 2002), and even though I still had to copy and paste all the entries from 2000 by hand, it didn’t take long before my entire history was uploaded into one system, for the very first time since I started this thing seven years ago.

Compared to the amount of time it took me to configure my journal layout the last few times I gave my site a redesign, this version was a piece of cake. I am kicking myself, ever so slightly, for waiting so long to switch over. At least, however, I finally made it. And look, I even found a theme that seems tailor made just for me.