First post!
I explain why I moved from self-hosted MovableType to hosted Wordpress.
I give up on self hosting. Let me explain.
Wait, no. There is too much. Let me sum up.
Upgrading MovableType
One night, I scooted over to my install of MT to take some notes, realized I was locked out, and couldn't find my own login details.
"It's probably due for an upgrade", I thought. So many vulnerabilities in MT 4.23 and earlier. Ok. Let's do this.
I had forgotten my password, but MT was so old, there was a strange password recovery phrase instead of a reset link. Yuck. I read through the sqlite tables and found the recovery phrase field, which was in plain text, and unlocked myself.
Deleted some zombie accounts I know I didn't create (not popular, no contributors), found the latest release, backed everything in public_html up into a tarball, deployed, upgraded. Pretty painless, except for the part where I had to find docs from 2009 (thank you, archive.org!).
Am I secure now?
It turns out, only as secure as 2012, when MT went closed source again. My install is 5.x series. A commercial install is 6.x series.
Shitballs.
Ask your sysadmin
<paraphrased>
ME: Hey, Admin. My blog software on our shared machine is from 4 years ago. There is a remote code execution exploit in it. Should I keep it on?
ADMIN: Hell no.
It was slightly more nuanced than that.
What now?
I poked around through a couple of open source blog releases. Tumblr is too peppy for my notes. Medium too stylish. WordPress is still actively maintained. I don't want to deal with security or upgrades. I'm willing to trade a free service with ads for that.
I just need to figure out how to import old entries.
So. Here we are.*
* (Edit 2025) - 2016 migration to Wordpress followed by a 2025 migration to paid hosted ghost.org
