As a result of a major upgrade at my web host, I’ve switched this blog from using Subtext to WordPress. My web host (CrystalTech) recently sent me an email to announce that they’ve installed IIS Mod-Rewrite for all ASP.NET hosting accounts. The lack of this feature was a deal-breaker in being able to run WordPress, which is my preferred blogging platform. If I were hosting my website on a Linux server, this would be much easier, but I need the ASP.NET server for other areas of the Wholeweal website that use ASP.NET scripting.
By default, WordPress creates URLs like http://www.wholeweal.com/blog/index.php?p=80. But this isn’t helpful for SEO purposes, and it isn’t very useful to the reader, either. So it has a feature to create URLs like http://www.wholeweal.com/blog/2009/04/05/a-nice-customer-testimonial-for-everybodyinn/ instead, which are vastly preferable from the point of view of both readers and Google. In order to do this, it uses a web server feature called mod_rewrite, which is built into the Apache web server which is frequently used for running WordPress. But IIS, the web server used by Windows, doesn’t have an equivalent feature by default - you have to purchase a third-party add-on to get that functionality.
(Subtext, by the way, is an ASP.NET application where WordPress runs on PHP. Subtext also creates SEO-friendly URLs, but it does it in a different fashion: it installs a custom 404 Not Found error page that does a redirect based on the incoming URL. To me, this is a much less elegant solution than using mod_rewrite, and makes it difficult to write your own custom 404 page for your website.)
So now that CrystalTech had installed IIS Mod-Rewrite, I almost immediately moved my blog to WordPress. The actual installation of WordPress is almost trivial - create a MySQL database for the blog, edit a configuration file with a few settings, and upload the WordPress folder to the web server. Since I only had about 20 blog posts, I chose to manually copy-and-paste them to WordPress as if I were writing new posts. If I had significantly more posts, I would have looked into a more automated importing process. Subtext can export a blog to the BlogML format which WordPress can then import, so that would probably have been the solution if I needed to go that route.
Why did I choose to move from Subtext to WordPress? There are several reasons.
- Subtext was significantly harder to make minor modifications to. Most changes required editing the actual code files. With WordPress, you can do a lot just using the administration interface.
- Subtext didn’t do pingbacks and trackbacks correctly in many cases. This is pretty important if you’re using a blog to grow your Internet traffic and visibility.
- Mostly, I moved over because of the much larger community and infrastructure available for WordPress. There are many themes available for WordPress, and an enormous number of plugins. For example, with Subtext I had to manually edit code files to add traffic statistics with Google Analytics. With WordPress, there’s a plugin available to do this for you. It’s not difficult to add the necessary code block, but it makes doing upgrades that much more difficult, because you have to remember to add the code again each time you upgrade.
- I find the default theme, and most themes, more attractive on WordPress than the themes available with Subtext. I still need to find a WordPress theme that I really like (right now, I’m using a slightly modified version of the default theme but that will change soon), but I’ll have a lot more choices than I did on Subtext.
Moving things over wasn’t very difficult. It took me just a couple of hours last night to install WordPress and copy over all of my old blog posts. I lost the few comments that I had, but I’m not going to lose too much sleep over those (there weren’t that many anyway).
Another benefit of having IIS Mod-Rewrite available is that I can now to permanent 301 redirects, which means I can make sure that wholeweal.com gets redirected to www.wholeweal.com (which is important from an SEO standpoint). I also redirected www.everybodyinn.com to www.wholeweal.com/EverybodyInn/, just in case anybody tries to type in the product name as a URL.