I’ve been meaning to move away from Movable Type for a while; they no longer provide the “Open Source” variant, I’ve had some issues with the commenting side of things (more the fault of spammers than Movable Type itself) and there are a few minor niggles that I wanted to resolve. Nothing has been particularly pressing me to move and I haven’t been blogging as much so while I’ve been keeping an eye open for a replacement I haven’t exerted a lot of energy into the process. I have a little bit of time at present so I asked around on IRC for suggestions. One was ikiwiki, which I use as part of helping maintain the SPI website (and think is fantastic for that), the other was Jekyll. Both are available as part of Debian Jessie.

Jekyll looked a bit fancier out of the box (I’m no web designer so pre-canned themes help me a lot), so I decided to spend some time investigating it a bit more. I’d found a Movable Type to ikiwiki converter which provided a starting point for exporting from the SQLite3 DB I was using for MT. Most of my posts are in markdown, the rest (mostly from my Blosxom days) are plain HTML, so there wasn’t any need to do any conversion on the actual content. A minor amount of poking convinced Jekyll to use the same URL format (permalink: /:year/:month/:title.html in the _config.yml did what I wanted) and I had to do a few bits of fix up for some images that had been uploaded into MT, but overall fairly simple stuff.

Next I had to think about comments. My initial thought was to just ignore them for the moment; they weren’t really working on the MT install that well so it’s not a huge loss. I then decided I should at least see what the options were. Google+ has the ability to embed in your site, so I had a play with that. It worked well enough but I didn’t really want to force commenters into the Google ecosystem. Next up was Disqus, which I’ve seen used in various places. It seems to allow logins via various 3rd parties, can cope with threading and deals with the despamming. It was easy enough to integrate to play with, and while I was doing so I discovered that it could cope with importing comments. So I tweaked my conversion script to generate a WXR based file of the comments. This then imported easily into Disqus (and also I double checked that the export system worked).

I’m sure the use of a third party to handle comments will put some people off, but given the ability to export I’m confident if I really feel like dealing with despamming comments again at some point I can switch to something locally hosted. I do wish it didn’t require Javascript, but again it’s a trade off I’m willing to make at present.

Anyway. Thanks to Tollef for the pointer (and others who made various suggestions). Hopefully I haven’t broken (or produced a slew of “new” posts for) any of the feed readers pointed at my site (but you should update to use feed.xml rather than any of the others - I may remove them in the future once I see usage has died down).

(On the off chance it’s useful to someone else the conversion script I ended up with is available. There’s a built in Jekyll importer that may be a better move, but I liked ending up with a git repository containing a commit for each post.)