Daily Archives: April 5, 2015


Change is Coming

Well, I know that I have not been posting more here as I had hoped to do.
In order to spend more time avoiding posts with even a hint of substance (no offense to the Friday Ark) I am going to spend time migrating this site from an ancient version of Movable Type to the latest version of Word Press. A task I have been contemplating for a few years.
Many years ago I considered the migration from MT 3.xx to 4.xx to be too daunting and am not even looking at MT 6.1, the latest version. I am very familiar with Word Press and have already done a test migration which turned out ok but it will be a work in progress.
Downtime
Modulator will be down for a while at some point over the next couple days. Possibly later tonight,maybe tomorrow…or Tuesday…or Wednesday.
There will be a status post up on the new site once it is live. Also expect some number of test posts. Apologies in advance.
Appearance
Once the site comes back on line most stuff should be usable but I will be experimenting with the layout for the next few weeks so you can expect some random visual changes. Some things will be not quite right.
I intend to keep things visually basic. There will not be a bunch of color, blinky stuff or other clutter. Some, but not much.
Please let me know if anything is too ugly on your device(s).
With the initial theme that I tried the Friday Ark does not not look as good on mobile devices as it currently does. In fact, it looks like crap. I will work on that but it may be a while before it is fixed.
Old Posts
Moveable Type creates static pages. I intend to keep all my old posts in their current folder. All old post, archive and category links should work.
Also, I will import all the old posts into the Word Press installation. This will result in pre migration posts having a double existence on the web. I hear that search engines may penalize this duplication a bit but I will live with that as I do not know how to do the magic regular expression stuff that might make for easy permalink changes and it might not be that straight forward since I intend to use a very different link structure on the new site.
My site statistics will show me which of the old posts are getting hit the most often and I will do 301 redirects for those.
News Feed
The RSS feed will change!
I will try to get the redirects from the old feeds done right but I recommend that you use the new feed:

http://themodulator.org/feed/

I will post a reminder about this after the new site is live but you can change this now as I will not making any more posts that the old feeds will see.
Also, be warned that you may see a bunch of old posts show up in your newsreader both as a result of redirects from the old to the new feed and the new feed seeing several thousand new posts.