digamma.net - notes

Welcome to the new improved digamma.net notes, now powered by WordPress! We’re moving in an exciting new direction, and really, no more than 3/4 of our staff can be expected to face downsizing as a result.

Why’d I make the switch from Movable Type?

1. Licensing. Movable Type is moving to a pricing model that isn’t free for a lot of uses. I’m not a GNU zealot, but WordPress’s GNU Public License means I’m guaranteed to be able to do what I want with it forever, and everyone else will be allowed to develop it and make it better for me.
2. Comment spam. I was getting hit with it at the old site, and deleting them was a huge pain. Now that I’m running on a MySQL backend, getting rid of a batch of spam means typing something like delete from wp_comments where comment_author_ip="198.26.120.13″;. For a lot of users, the ability to do command-line database queries is irrelevant, but it matters to me. Furthermore, I expect GPL’ed products to produce newer and better spam-fighting innovations.
3. Oversleeping. I was supposed to go to Boston today, and according to my calculations, I must have hit my Snooze button in my sleep exactly 23 times over a period of 3 hours and 25 minutes. Subconscious Digamma is a resourceful guy. So I had some free time on my hands. Normally this is the kind of banal observation that goes in my LiveJournal, but those folks are in a world of pain this weekend. (Side note: LiveJournal rocks. I’m a paid member.)

There are downsides, mind you. I had this site almost ready to go last July, but I never pulled the trigger. Why?

1. PHP. I just don’t like it as much as Perl. My instinct tells me its rich library of functions has security problems, though Perl may have all the same ones.
2. Dynamic generation of pages. By default, Movable Type writes pages to static HTML files and lets your web server serve them up. WordPress generates every page on the fly from the database. My personal preference is for MT’s method. There’s apparently a WordPress plugin to “staticize” pages that I should look into.
3. Permalinks. The few outside links I’ve gotten are pretty much broken now. I can’t decide whether to leave the MT tree open for people to read, or whether having that on Google will discourage people from coming to the new site, where they could post comments.

But I’m glad to be moved in. Now all I have to do is unpack these boxes.