The blog spam finally annoyed me enough to switch from MoveableType to WordPress. It took a little while to get everything the way I wanted it.

I started by installing it in a separate directory that I could play in while I got the various things sorted out. Installation was trivial following the 5-minute install instructions. After that I spent a long time working on the style sheet to get it to look close to my old MT one, and a few moments working on the index.php file.

Finally, I had to import all the old entries from my MT weblog. This took a few attempts to get right, but with some patches for both MT and WordPress from DrBacchus’ Journal and a slightly modified version of the Apache re-write engine rules from the same site, I have all the old entries imported and hopefully all the magic in place to fixup old links.

For those, like me, that have to use the .htaccess approach to the URL fixing, here’s the content of the .htaccess file I placed in my blog’s home directory:

# Movable Type -> WordPress fu
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^archives/([0-9]*).html index.php?p=$1 [PT]
RewriteRule ^archives/([0-9]*)_([0-9]*).html index.php?m=$1$2 [PT]
RewriteRule ^index.rdf$ wp-rss2.php [PT]

That seems to allow the links in search engines at least to find their way to the new home for my old entries (if you find any that are broken please send me the link). It also works for links using my sub-domain link mechanism.

Now it is all in place, and I hope working. WordPress has a number of options for dealing with the blog spam too (some of which are available in newer versions of MT too, but there were just too many hoops to jump through to get a newer version of MT).