I know I’ve been pretty quiet lately, but I’ve been working on migrating the blogs to a new platform. They are currently hosted on MovableType (running on my own server) but the software is out of date and the upgrade is a) paid and b) of questionable value.
When I started with MT over 2 years ago there wasn’t much choice. MT owned the market, mainly by being very powerful and free for personal use. Since then things have changed dramatically. PHP is no longer obscure; it has become a lot easier to implement and support. There are some really excellent content management systems like Testpatter (free) and ExpressionEngine (free and commercial versions) implemented in PHP; there are also some excellent personal publishing tools which run on it. (Macintouch has an excellent running report on CMS here.)
I’ve demoed a few of these systems on line, and have installed both Drupal and Wordpress. Drupal appears to be more powerful but Wordpress is much more widely supported with plugins, themes and extensions.
Two of the more difficult problems to solve are migrating the old MT posts to the new system and not breaking the permanent links. I think I’ve solved the migration problem but the permalink one is tough. Good think I sport the geek gene. 