Moving my blog to Movable Type

The reasons for the move are quite varied. Planning for the long term, I figured I'd need something more portable than OS X Server's blogging server (OSXBS) if I were to change host. OSXBS is also designed for departmental blogging, rather than Internet blogging. This means it lacks proper support for trackbacks, pings, template modification, multiple categories and so on. Movable Type has all these things as more.

OSXBS is also very inflexible. You can't rename categories, delete categories, etc plus it more or less runs separately from the web server itself (being Tomcat driven), meaning you can't really take advantage of redirects, performance caching and all the other good things about OS X Server's Apache system. Moveable Type generates pages and stores them in the file system, meaning you can cache them if they're static and they're easy to back up.

Two last good things about MT: Adobe GoLive CS 2 supports all the MT includes, so you can edit your templates in GoLive then upload them; and there's a whole load of third-party programs that support MT, including Tiger widgets.

In case you're wondering, it's slightly painful getting Moveable Type to run on OS X Server, but not much:

1. Download the software


2. Unzip it and give the folder an easy new name


3. Separate out the "mt-static" directory


4. In the main folder, create an "mt-config.cgi" file according to the MT instruction manual (you won't find the "mt-config.cgi-original" described)


5. Upload both directories to the server


6. Enable CGI-Executables in the Server Admin program for your site


7. Run CPAN and install all the modules mentioned in the MT list of requirements. You probably won't be able to get Image Magick to compile. You'll also need to install DBI to give DBD::mysql, etc to work


8. After that, it should be all systems go

All those Perl modules means MT isn't as portable as I'd hoped, but I'm sure by the time I need to relocate, I'll be able to find a host that offers MT support.