I decided three years ago that I needed a blog. Prior to this, I had written several “articles” in HTML and published them to a section of the old site entitled “(r)Ant”. The reason I wanted a blog was to take advantage of the built-in archiving and categorization that blog software affords. I wanted to spend less time “coding” and more time writing.

I chose an open source package called bBlog. I hacked away at it until it looked and behaved the way I wanted, then started blogging. Subsequently, bBlog went tits up (sorry to get technical), and no one was writing bug fixes or adding new features. I knew that migrating from one blog package to another was going to be a huge pain in the ass, so I put it off. Recent problems compelled me to bite the bullet and invest the effort to switch from bBlog to WordPress and, as of this post, you’re soaking in it.

Cosmetically, you will notice few changes. I went from a three column layout (date, content, sidebar) to a two column layout (date + content, sidebar), which buys me a little more real estate in the content column. Everything else looks and behaves pretty much the same as it did before, except now I’m using software backed by a thriving developer community.

Doing the migration was an interesting exercise. Pretty much every web-related skill I’ve learned (HTML, PHP, SQL, Regex, Apache) was brought to bear, and the whole thing probably took 30 hours. If I had to do it again it would probably take half the time, eliminating the effort I expended going down blind alleys, and the like. So it goes.

If you access the blog via the RSS feed, please update the feed URL to the following, at your convenience:

https://www.mrpikes.com/blog/?feed=rss2

The old feed, however, will continue to work for a period of time.

Thank you, kindly.