Introducing the New Geek News Central!

The switch from Movable Type to WordPress is now complete and what a journey it has been.  Yes I know let the rejoicing begin the last diehard MT user has left the building.  The move was needed but there were a number of significant challenges in moving from MT to WP that I will highlight below.

My hat is off to the team at SpaceBlue for the redesign and integration work. They went above and beyond the line of duty. I highly recommend them great design team. Although the logo redesign in concept was my idea and Brian improved upon it in a big way. Contest starting next week on Geek News Central on where I came up with the logo idea.

This is Geek News Central Version 3.0 aka this is the third skin and the first in which we are running on WordPres. I hope the look and feel is something we can stay with for a few years. Let me highlight the reasons for the switch from Movable Type to WordPress.  First and foremost I don’t think SixApart cares about their bloggers  anymore and in my opinion have been too slow to meet my new publishing needs.

Second their new media support was literally non-existent, and only a few small improvements have been made to taht part of the platform  since 2004. But I will be very honest, without my team working hard on the PowerPress Podcast Plugin making a clean and seamless transition from MT to WP would have been nearly impossible! Let me explain that more in a few paragraphs.

Some background Geek News Central while running on MT was in fact three separate blogs made to look like one the reasons why are to complex to get into. To make the move I had to combine content from all three blogs into a single wordpress install. Then we had to map links from the old blog to the new. With over 8000 articles this was no small challenge but 99.8% of all the old links were able to be re-mapped.

A condition of the move from MT to WP required that I have static RSS feeds. This site gets way to much traffic to depend on dynamic rss feeds.  Angelo from SpaceBlue had a “Static Feed” plugin that solved this issue. End result my podcast listeners and blog subscribers see no change the feed is the same url it was on MT.

Why no other Podcast Plugin would do and how PowerPress saved the day.  PowerPress has the capability to setup multiple RSS feeds. Being I had a Blog, Audio, Video and Special Media RSS feed each with different content I needed a Podcast Plugin that could support that many feeds. Additonally this will allow me to start creating media for other devices like mobile phones that can be subscribed via new feeds. So we have huge growth opportunity now.

The biggest challenge was one that a lot of podcaster face if they are on Blogger or on other platforms like Movable Type in that. Movable Types 3rd Party Podcast plugin was simple in that you Hyper-linked a media file in your blog post and the enclosure was detected and written in the RSS feed.

WordPress natively supports that method minus iTunes support. So my guys at Blubrry updated our PowerPress Podcast Plugin so that I could import all of my past hyperlinked podcasts into the specific Powerpress feeds I had created. The import function in PowerPress probably saved me over 100 hours of cleanup work.

So here we are all setup on WordPress, and while there are some tweaks to be done, I am very much pleased with the end result. Comments will be able to left easier now, and I have the tools I need to move forward with Geek News Central in a way that I feel very good about.

We will see how nice Google is to us in the transition I am expecting big results based on what changes have been made and what we have planned for the future.