Blog is back

I am sure most of you noticed that my blog has been gone for about a month. I am somewhat (because I used to be the biggest movable type snob) proud to announce that I have completely ditched movable type (mt). In order to migrate my blog entries properly I had to write some perl to interact with the movable type platform. This is because the export format in the movable type platform is lossy. I've taken the other scripts I have made for movable type and put them in a google code project entitled mt-cli-scripts. You can visit the project here. This was very tedious because of the following code block from my mt-export-blog script...

sub get_categories
{
    my $entry = $_[0];

    my $categories_ = "";
    my $categories = $entry->categories;

    foreach my $category_object (@$categories)
    {
        # The line of code below was a BITCH to figure out.
        my $category = MT::Category->load($category_object->id);
        $categories_ = $category->label . "," . $categories_;
    }

    $categories_ = substr($categories_, 0, -1);

    return $categories_;
}

The documentation for the movable type API is in perldoc format. And all it said about $entry->categories was that it was an array of categories. It said nothing about having to invoke MT::Category->load($category->id);. This was probably the most horrid part of an API, I have ever seen.

So why did I do this? I wanted more control over all blog entries especially the entires with source code blocks. I wanted to move to an extremely simple blog platform. Simple to me meant no more comments, categories, blog roll, and badges. So out of all of those features, comments is the most people enjoy. I figure at this point people can email me if they have questions or want to say something about a particular blog entry. As for flickr/twitter/blog roll badges, I sincerely hope that this website has evolved enough to circumvent the need for those quintessential blog badges. Another very challenging/annoying part of this process is having to reformat almost every single blog entry. For example you might notice that at the time of this blog entry the archive page for 2004 is horribly formated.