There’s a new engine in town

If you read this site in an RSS reader, you haven’t noticed anything, but if you drop in on the home page, you’ll see a brand new look for The Core Dump. The look is actually the default for a blog engine called Typo. (Yes, it’s the same as the Wordpress default.) Needless to say, the default look isn’t going to stay for long, even though it is pretty nice and mellow.

Why move over from Movable Type to a brand-new wet-behind-the-ears blog engine, you might ask? There are several reasons. Movable Type is a very good, mature engine, and has been solid as a rock here for several years, but it’s started to stagnate a bit; the fun and whimsy just isn’t there anymore. Also, some of the Movable Type weaknesses were starting to get annoying.

The biggest of those weaknesses really isn’t Movable Type’s fault, but rather a byproduct of their success: Being the biggest kid on the block makes you a target, and it seems every asshole comment spammer out there is targeting the platform.

But the main thing is the slowness. Posting takes forever and rebuilds take forever. Of course, running a site on a 450MHz G4 isn’t exactly a ticket to fastness, but it’s still annoying. Yes, I could have gone full-on live-PHP with Movable Type, but that would have been just as much work as switching engines, so why not just take the plunge?

The main reasons for switching over, however, are that a) I’m pretty damn impressed by Ruby on Rails and want to get more involved with it; b) it was time for me to get involved in some serious nerditry; and c) the Live Search feature is teh r0x0r. This is what AJAX is all about. Sexy, sexy stuff.

So we’ll see how Typo performs on my poor ghetto server and how stable it is over time. This should be a fun ride.

I’m going to put up a longer nerd post on Tech Goes Boom with the tech minutiae of migrating from Movable Type to Typo later on. Now it’s time to grovel over source code.