New weblog

This is the new weblog for the updated website. Unlike the wiki, I haven’t made any attempt at importing the old articles into the new system; I’ll instead be uploading a static mirror of the old pages (and will provide the mirror URL here shortly). Movable Type (the system I used to use) essentially works by writing out static HTML or PHP files to disk, so I’ll just be copying those files over, basically.

I made the decision not to do an import into the new database because weblogs, by their very nature, tend to have transitory content. This is unlike wikis which should in theory have articles of relatively lasting relevance and which I’ll probably continue to make edits to in the future. So I think that for the weblog posts the static mirror should be enough.

Another factor is that the old engine had content in a number of formats, "almost HTML" (basically HTML with implicit paragraphs), Markdown, and wikitext. I simply haven’t had the time to develop adequate scripts to import this kind of information in an automated fashion. It’s something that I may consider doing down the track, however.

The other key change is that the new weblog actually replaces several different weblogs on the old server. On the old server I had a "news" weblog where I wrote about products, a "personal" weblog were I wrote about technical topics, a "mini-log" for posting quick links and snippets, and a "quick links" log for posting links to news related to my products. In hindsight I think these multiple sources of information were too hard to discover and in the interests of simplicity I’m going to have just one weblog now for everything, and you’re reading it right now.

Part of the challenge will be not just simplifying the structure of the site, but my writing as well. I’ll be striving to make my posts more concise and to-the-point. This current post is probably not the best start! There are actually two more weblog-like logs that I published on the old site which I will eventually merge into the new site: I had a "Git log" that reported all the source code changes I was checking in to my Git (and before that Subversion repository) and a "nightlies log" which listed nightly preview builds as they were uploaded to the server. Both of these features will be coming back to the new site, but probably in a different form.