I finally gave up resisting all the peer pressure and installed WordPress on the site.  As expected, the installation went just fine and the basic install worked OK right out of the box.  There were a couple of things I needed to do though:

Converting the old blog posts to the new format was fairly simple – just read them all out from my existing database table and put them into the wp_posts table for WordPress to use.  I wrote a script to do this bit and after a couple of false starts it went through the thousand-odd entries and moved them over.

The only real problem I had was getting the old blog URLs to work in the new format.  For reasons lost to me now, I had decided to use only 2 digits for the year, whereas WordPress uses 4.  A quick RewriteRule to affect a 301 redirect to the new URLs, and all my cached Google links are working again.

I better investigate some themes and plugins later.

So you may have noticed – assuming you are sad enough to actually check the front page more than once in a blue moon – that the site hasn’t been updated for quote some time.

The main reason is that I’ve been working on a pet project that I just launched this week, but I’ve also been messing about with Twitter, and since it’s more ADHD-pleasing than coming up with a decent-length entry on a bl0g, plus you get other people’s thoughts as well, I’ve actually rather been enjoying it.

Of course, all is not roses and sunshine. More and more frequently the Twitter hamster runs out of puff as the sheer number of people using the website brings things to a crawl. Spammers are legion as with all new tech, and the thought of people automatically seeing what you type instead of having to visit a dedicated website can be a little offputting. On the whole, however, it’s a Good Thing.

Let’s face it, if I had to fill this thing in every day, you’d get variations on the theme of “Got up, performed ablutions, did some work, ate, watched TV, went to bed” every single time.