Digenis.org

Yep, things look different here both on the surface and behind the curtains. It’s been six months since the last facelift of this site (a new record, no doubt), so I couldn’t resist. I figured it would coincide nicely with the imminent release of SixApart’s 3.0 developer’s version of MovableType, killing the upgrade and redesign with one stone.

Well, a little bit over a week ago SixApart threw half the blogosphere into a frenzy when they announced a tiered pricing system with their newest release of MT, a CMS that has been free up until this point. The new pricing scheme cuts out the whole middle strata of MT users, requiring them to pay up to $700 if they want to upgrade to the newest release.

Now, SixApart is a business and they have every right to charge whatever they want for their product. They’re good at what they do and MovableType is certainly worth paying for (one of the stories that’s been circulating is that SixApart got only fifty cents for each download of MT software; that’s just sad). However, as Dean at HYCW, this only raises the questions “how much should we pay?” and “for what features?” The fact that the newest version of MT is not significantly different from its predecessor (v 2.65), that it spits out invalid code, and that it is much more restrictive than any of the other versions of MT (specifically in the amount of blogs and authors one can have) should make us wonder if MT is still our best choice in blogging.

All of this has caused a huge exodus of MT users to other blogging software like WordPress, Textpattern, Drupal, and the recently rejuvenated Blogger. Some left for reasons of principle, others were probably just feeling a little hurt that SixApart had decided to take MT in a direction that didn’t focus on them. Either way, it has brought to the forefront several decent CMS’s that were previously barely known due to MT’s domination.

The most notable of these is certainly WordPress (formerly b2). I’ve been reading about WP for the past week and have discovered that it is extremely userfriendly, opensource, offers most of the best features that MT offered (and more!), is extremely compliant with web standards, uses PHP rather than Perl, has a zealous community of users and coders who are constantly creating new plug-ins and hacks, is dynamic (i.e., doesn’t require all the slow rebuilds that MT does), and much more. One more important thing is that it’s licensed under the GNU General Public License, so every future version will be free and no more restrictive than the first release. To put it another way, we don’t have to worry about having another MT repeat with WordPress.

The only hesitance I had in switching to Wordpress had to do with the fact that I didn’t want to break my old MT permalinks. I had ‘future-proofed’ them back in January with DiveIntoMark’s tutorial, but I worried that they wouldn’t make it through the switch. Much to my pleasure, I found a good deal of documentation online about importing old MT entries into Wordpress while maintaining dirified permalinks. It was even pretty easy.

I made the switch and I’m loving WordPress.

A few things about the new design:
+ I’ve designed the site with Strict XHTML and valid CSS. There are a few quirks, but for the most part every generated page should validate. It was designed with Mozilla browsers (FireFox, Netscape) in mind, but should look fine in the most recent versions of other browsers. Even those that don’t like to comply with web standards.
+ The Russia ACTR photoblog will be down for a little while. The template I used before was very dependent on the MT code, so I have to adapt/reinvent it for WP.
+ The site is still under a Creative Commons 2.0 license, so you can use any of the content (including photographs) accordingly.
+ Please note that some of my contact info has changed on the Contact page. I finished up studying with ACTR, so I won’t be able to receive snail mail at that address anymore. As a matter of fact, I will be couch-bumming and house-sitting until I move into my new place in August, so let’s just use e-mail for now, alright?

If something seems screwy or doesn’t load, send an e-mail my way and let me know what browser you are using.