So Your Mother Might Start Blogging 3 comments


If you are a techie type and your mother is thinking about blogging what would you do?
If you are Matt Mullenweg you will create a few nifty programs to help her out.
For instance, a spam catcher like Akismet:

I’m also the primary person on Akismet, Automattic’s anti-spam software for websites, which we created from scratch. We just added the first engineer six months ago, but for the past four years, it’s been just me. I decided to do it because I was worried about my mom. She hadn’t started a blog yet, but I had this crazy fear that when she did, she’d be bombarded by spam for Viagra and think that had something to do with what I did all day.

Second, if you want to make it easy for her, why heck, just create WordPress or, for the ultimate in ease of use, get a free blog on WordPress.com :

My mom started a blog a couple of weeks ago. Six years into this, and we finally made it easy enough for my mom to use.

Yea, I know this site runs on Movabletype. If time permits and all the migration issues can be resolved I’ll move it over to WordPress some day down the road.


3 thoughts on “So Your Mother Might Start Blogging

  • Steve

    I see you say “practically seamless.”
    What issues did you run into?
    And how did you handle your old links? I tried one from 2005 and got a 404 message.
    I would like to be able to keep my old links active and also move to a friendlier url structure. Something like */year/month/day/post title/. I suspect this will be a bit tricky…

  • alice

    Well, actually, you’ve hit on the only really big transition issue I faced. WordPress lets you pick your permalink URL pattern, so in theory, it might be possible to set up the new blog so that the old internal links would still work. In theory, anyway.
    I suppose it would also be possible to do some sort of a grep pattern search-and-replace to update the old links so that they work in the new setting. Again, in theory. Maybe.
    But even if none of that works, you can still install a plugin called broken link checker that at least makes it easy to find the links that aren’t working any more. That’s the route that I took.
    It’s been a busy year, so I haven’t finished cleaning up the archives, but I don’t think my sevens of readers spend much time in my archives anyway — I made sure the major posts (the ones that have historically been popular in the search engines) have been fixed and I’m slowly but surely working on the rest as time allows…

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