Today marks the day that I jump ship and head towards a different blogging platform.
For the past few years, I’ve been using Serendipity, a very capable and extremely well-made open-source blogging platform. Several years before I started Leighlo.com, I’d run a couple of my own blogs on different engines. Each of these tended to be inflexible, irritating, and useless at resisting Spam. When I got my hands on Serendipity, though, I thought that I’d finally found a team that new what they were doing.
Serendipity was brilliant. It was fast, strong, and secure, and it gave me some level of customisation that my puny Earth brain could wrap itself around.
But in recent months, my love for Serendipity has started to lessen.
As I use WordPress more and more for my work at The Gadget Grill, the size of the community as well as it’s sheer ability to be modified makes me want to move. I’ve been using Serendipity a while and now it’s time to move on.
I have a new design, a new logo, and the ability to add some cool features like Twitter… because no one Twitters more than a freelance tech journo.
Well, maybe a porn star.
Or John Mayer.
Regardless, moving from Serendipity is a little hard so in case anyone’s thinking about switching over too, here’s a link you’re going to need.
There’s an early version of this converter floating around… version .7 or .8 or something and it just doesn’t work. It’s not if you have a large blog in the slightest and doesn’t seem to work well. So this dobschat bloke has gone and made it better and it actually works.
A couple of notes though:
- If you ever used those parentheses codes, you’re out of luck. Posts with those will come up with the [img] or [url=yaddyadda] in the actual writing as it has here.
- Be careful with what type of permalinking you set up on WordPress because the directory structure could mess around with image & multimedia linking in posts.
- Anything you’ve left as a “draft” in your blog entries will now be published. So… you know… if you’ve got that as a situation, you’ll need to go through one active installation of Serendipity to fix things while setting up the WordPress one.
- If you used some of Serendipity’s statistics plugins, you’ll lose all of those hit counts. You might also lose any links Google have made to you, but that’s expected with the transition to a new page.
But that’s about it. Brilliant work, imports the comments and pages with all the dates intact. I have my blog in a new form and now it’s ready to go!
Well sort of. I’m sure I’ll be cleaning out the non-WYSIWYG codes out of older posts for agggeeeeesss.