I’m finally caving in and switching to WordPress. I tried it long long time ago and was annoyed by some of its code (it’s not always pretty) and the fact that pages are never cached – there are a lot of on-demand database requests. But it’s been a while and things seem to have improved – some within WordPress itself, but others due to the help of the community which has provided tons of plugins that can help WordPress get around some of its problems.
The move from MovableType to WordPress was easy. WordPress has import functionality that plays very nicely with MovableType’s exported files. Yay!
What got me, though, is how to handle making sure that visitors to my old site would know to come to the new site. Long time ago, I’d think to just take everything down and have a page saying “stuff has moved, deal with it, here’s the new URL”, but that’s not really very user friendly. Michael Bloch points out here the not-so-good approaches for moving your site and recommends using the HTTP status code 301: Moved Permanently. This will make everything magially work: users will be redirected properly and search engines will know that the resources have moved and start looking for them in the new places.
