Migrated to WordPress

Three years ago I began making plans to make changes to this site. Today, I’m pleased to say that I’ve finally done what I actually set out to do back then. Embarrassingly, it took me less than 16 hours from start to finish.

What have I done?

• Migrated from a nearly five-year-old Habari installation to WordPress. Habari treated me well, but development has effectively stopped.
• Moved my RSS feeds–please let me know if this blog post shows up in your feed reader!
• Actually optimized the site for search engines and wired up Google and Microsoft’s Webmaster Tools.
• Speaking of which, cool URIs don’t change. Let me know if you find any broken links–I believe that I’ve managed to successfully migrate every single one.
• Absolutely nothing when it came to actually building my own theme. Behold, this year’s default WordPress theme, Twenty Fifteen!
• Some mild performance tuning of WordPress. Out of the box neither WordPress nor the Twenty Fifteen theme are particularly optimal. They’re still not, but it’s a fair amount better now. Regardless it is outperforming the old Habari site by leaps and bounds.
• Subscribed to the WordPress Security Feed so that I get notifications for security vulnerabilities. This is one of the downsides in moving to a commonly targeted platform. There were probably numerous security vulnerabilities in Habari, but it wasn’t worth anybody’s time to try and find them.
• Upgraded PHP. I was previously running on 5.2, but I’ve now moved to 5.4.

Of course there are still things left to do:

• Reclaim #1 in Google from my GitHub account. Whoops.
• Manually review every single existing entry to adjust for hacks accumulated throughout the past seven years.
• Figure out why my caching setup isn’t properly setting expires headers. I’m blaming my host.
• Since I’m likely going to spend another large number of years in this state, I suppose that I’ll actually do a little bit to the theme at some point.

The cobbler’s children are no longer unshorn. Maybe I’ll actually write a bit more now that this thing is in better shape. Maybe.