Here it is, the tenth and largest ever revision of firsttube.com.  After a long decision-making process, I decided to migrate to Wordpress.  There are a number of reasons why I did this, but here are a few.

First of all, Wordpress is  actively developed… a lot.  Small Axe is a lot of fun, but it’s a hobby, and although one I enjoy, it was a lot of work.  On top of that, certain features were a challenge for me that I simply never had enough time to implement, such as a quality API.  With Wordpress, I can post from my iPhone.  Or Flickr.  Or Digg.  Etc.   

I was also able to preserve my permalink structure with this code. I’ve developed a decent standing in Google, one I’m fearing I will have destroyed with this migration, but it was important that my links be maintained.  

Themes with Wordpress are a snap.  Honestly, changing the look and feel is cake once it’s uploaded.  

The migration to Wordpress was PAINFUL! Importing the feeds was easy enough, it can be done via RSS, so I quickly edited my RSS script to output my whole blog.  Boom! Done. But getting comments in was a lot of work.  I think I’ve covered all of them though, and that’s exciting.  

One problem is that my “tags” came over as “categories” and my “topics” were entirely discarded.  Had I been a little smarter about Wordpress, I could easily have fixed that. But that part doesn’t really bother me, so it will stay reversed.  Dammit.

I’m still considering whether I want to host my own comments or push them into Disqus. I really like Disqus, but I’m not entirely certain about pushing my blog content to a third party service.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with this iteration and the theme I’ve adopted.  The HTML needs some work, there are a few pages/site features I’ve still not properly migrated, but all in all, I’m feeling good about this move.  It gives me more time to focus on other PHP projects, Wordpress add-ons, and OSNews.   I’ll keep you all posted, and now that I’ve upgraded to a new codebase, I promise to update more often.  In the meantime, enjoy firsttube.com 10.