This blog has, until now, run on Movable Type. I initially chose Movable Type when I set up my first self-hosted blog back in 2002. Back then Movable Type was the only real choice in this area and it had the bonus that it was written in Perl so I could hack on it if I wanted to. Of course I never got round to doing that.

Since then I’ve set up many blogs and they’ve pretty much all used Movable Type. But over the last year or so I’ve been wondering if that’s the right choice. There are a few reasons for this, but the main one is the relative popularity of MT compared with other platforms. There just isn’t the community of people producing themes and plugins for MT that is for, say, WordPress.

I’m already pretty impressed. Moving the stuff over from MT was pretty painless and I’m already reaping the benefit of the larger ecosystem. I’ve found plugins that deal simply with things like Google Adsense and Google Analytics.

Currently the links to the monthly archives are broken. But I’m sure I’ll get those fixed in the next day or so. I’ll be monitoring the error logs closely to see if there are any other missing pages, but please let me know if you find anything that’s broken.

Oh, and just to head off some obvious comments – yes, I’m using a blog engine that is built in PHP, not Perl. My operating system isn’t written in Perl, nor is my web browser or, indeed, most of the software I use from day to day. It would be great if there was a powerful and popular blogging engine written in Perl. But there isn’t, so I’m using this instead.

Warning: It’s likely that I’m going to spend some time playing around until I find a theme that I like. This site is likely to look different every time you visit over the coming weeks.