Ok, so in just a few hours after my last post, I did some more research into various weblog and BBS software, and got Movabletype installed on my server. It’s a very cool piece of software. I didn’t realize. It’s not all that different from iBlog–though it definitely has a lot more “bells and whistles.” The authoring software just runs on the server as a set of perl scripts instead of on your local machine. But then it generates all the pages. I was thinking it was going to rely more on pages that we generated “on the fly”. That’s how a PHP-based system like Geeklog would work.
So this is good. I should have a pretty darn fast site with the most of the content on the pages being hard coded. All of those slow downs I experienced because of offsite content generation won’t exist because it will be handled by my own server. Plus with full pages of HTML existing on my site, there shouldn’t be any problems with search engines.
I’ve already managed to get all of my posts converted over. There’s still quite a bit of work to do though. I have to get my templates working so that I have my “Halloween” style back. Plus I have to figure out if there are any plugins I want to install to add even more functionality to my site. And I have to go and make up some document referrers to point the old pages to the new ones, and a good “404 page not found” to help people transition over to the new version.