I got kinda sick of the “inconsistant” nature of the way my old blog handled, amongst other things, subscriptions. There was a pretty random nature to it, and Friday afternoon I decided I had had enough.

My first action was to attempt to upgrade the notification plugin for Movable Type I was using. This was now a plugin that people have to pay for, so I decided to implement the latest version of Movable Type itself, and see if there were any new (free) plugins for it.

To say that the Movable Type documentation on the new version is lax may perhaps be the understatement of the year. I searched, and trudged, and trudgedly searched before giving up and deciding to look elsewhere.

My next action was to hit the folks at Blogsome, who I’m pretty impressed with. The problem is though that they don’t support “Notifications” either, instead preferring the more trendy and techno-savvy RSS feeds. (To be fair, the old version of Movable Type supported RSS feeds as well, but the primary problem for me is that my readship don’t support them.) Also, I couldn’t import 1000 entries into Blogsome from my backup.

I knew Blogsome used Wordpress, and I soon had Wordpress installed and basically operating. Importing previous entries was relatively straightforward, and all I then needed to do was install the plugins I wanted, and edit the templates.

I discovered Subscribe2 and Contact Form 7 to handle my email notification and email response forms respectively. I messed about with the CSS to get the formatting of my headerbar and posts corrected, and I’m pretty happy now with the new look.

Oh, I indiscriminately added a few friends to the “pre-subscribed” list, which hopefully means that you’ll get this post in your email without you having to do anything.

What’s still to do? A better method of integrating pictures, and getting my “favourites” back on the sidebar. Any other ideas?