Anyone who recently visited may have noticed things look very different this week. I’ve re-vamped the site and moved to a new blogging system.

I originally set up the site on MovableType, a popular blogging system written in Perl. It seemed more stable and feature-filled than the PHP options available (or that I knew of).

Last week, I was checking the MT site for updates (as a vBulletin admin, I’ve learned to check regularly to be aware of fixes to protect against security issues), and learned of their new licensing fees and platform.

Frankly, I have no problem with developer fees. I’m a web developer in my daytime life and understand how important it is to pay the bills. Rather, I was intrigued about the new platform and poked around the Web looking for word from users on how they liked it.

In my research, I found plenty of people happy, plenty grouchy about the MT fee structure and plenty moving over to this thing called WordPress.

I read up on WordPress, did a quick install and pounded on it a bit and decided it was perfect for me.

Why?

1. It’s built in the coding / data combo I love most: PHP/mySQL. I’ve been coding in Perl for the better part of a decade and got up to speed on PHP just in the last couple of years. As a rule, I’ll work with Perl if I have to, but will try to do everything in PHP wherever possible. It’s just more intuitive for me.

2. Flat files. MT writes flat files for posts. At least the version I was on did. I got tired of having to “rebuild the site.”

So we’re here. On PHP-powered WordPress and loving it.

Also, I should note that I’m using a couple of very cool add-ons. The Heavy Rotation list, integrated with Amazon.com, was written by Denyerec and is available here. And the style is based on an original style created by the good people at 3digita Design, and uses a style customization plugin written by WordPress developer Alex King.

Whew.