Meet the New Blog, Same As The Old Blog

I spent a fair amount of time this past weekend working on this site. While the new look is probably obvious, the more significant change was the move to WordPress.

When I set up this blog in 2005, I was spending a significant amount of time developing Web applications in ColdFusion.  I anticipated wanting to tinker with any blogging engine I installed. I enjoy working on CFML-based systems much more than PHP, so I chose BlogCFC as my blogging engine.

So why change? So after almost five years of irregular blogging, the hacking of BlogCFC never really materialized. When I signed on to the Nerd Thunderdome festivities last month, I was reminded of the somewhat do-it-yourself nature of BlogCFC (case in point: Ray is again considering including a Rich Text Editor in BlogCFC). I was also still using the stock visual design of BlogCFC. Over the years I’d talked to various people, including my wife (Michelle Panulla, a talented Web designer and developer) about getting help in skinning this site. The fact that I was running a fairly custom system meant I was probably going to have to do the bulk of the template work myself.

After giving it a lot of thought, I decided to switch to WordPress. Though I still love ColdFusion as a platform, I’m less interested in opening the hood of every piece of software I install. I equate this to building your own computer system or tinkering with desktop Linux – at some point all that mucking around loses its charm and you want to focus on the objective. Or, maybe I’ve just refocused where I want to do my tinkering.

I did some research and I found a nice post by James Netherton from 2007 with a small CF app he wrote to migrate BlogCFC to WordPress database-to-database. The app got me most of the way to where I wanted to be, but it had some issues with posts labeled in multiple categories. I rewrote the parts of the conversion that dealt with categories and was able to migrate all of my posts, comments, and categories without incident.

Since it seems that someone migrates from BlogCFC to WordPress every year or so, I’ve posted the source of the updated migration tool to my space on GitHub for the next person who wants to make the jump.