Service Note

Posted on January 17, 2011

This blog has switched from Movable Type to WordPress.

The reason wasn’t because I didn’t like Movable Type.  It’s because Movable Type increasingly appears to be a dead product, at least for individual, not-for-profit bloggers.  MT parent company Six Apart lost interest in folks like me a long time ago, and their recent sale to advertising company VideoEgg makes me doubt that MT will ever be aimed at us again.

It’s too bad.  Movable Type was a pioneering product.  When Just Well Mixed launched back in 2002 (nearly a decade ago! yeesh!), Movable Type hadn’t even hit version 1.0 yet; it was still a hobby project offered by Ben and Mena Trott to a world that mostly hadn’t ever heard the word “blog”.  Part of my rationale for launching JWM was to give myself an excuse to try their interesting-looking tool out.  It turned out to be awesome; there’s a reason why MT dominated the blog software space for many years.  Of course, it was eventually supplanted by WordPress — the exact reasons why are disputed; I gave my thoughts on the subject on Quora recently — but it was still a powerful, elegant tool, even if it stagnated feature-wise.

As an early adopter of Movable Type, it was a sad moment to realize that there probably wasn’t much future left in it. But as Deadwood‘s Al Swearengen put it, “Change ain’t lookin’ for friends. Change calls the tune we dance to.”  And so it goes. So today marks the official end of the Movable Type era at Just Well Mixed and the beginning of the WordPress era.

Most features of the site have been ported over — archives are working, permalinks redirecting, etc. — but any time you move a site with nearly ten years’ worth of content from one CMS to another there’s going to be a few glitches, so accept my apologies in advance if you run into one, and pardon the dust while I finish sanding off the rough edges.

And thanks for being a JWM reader!  Because in the end that’s much more important than which content management system is under the hood.