After debating for months on moving from Windows Live Spaces to my own Wordpress hosted blog, I’ve finally made the jump.  The biggest reason was that I couldn’t get the flexibility out of Spaces that I wanted, in particular, page customization.  I hated having a blog that looked so cookie cutter. 

Since Spaces’ RSS feed only gives me the last 30 posts in my blog, I had a heck of a time migrating my content.  Cem tried helping me out by writing a perl script to crawl my Space and save each blog post’s page locally.  However, I abandoned the hopes of automating this  after realizing (a) there was a decent amount of post-processing that would need to be done on crawled pages and (b) that my perl is extremely rusty :) 

 I ended up using the built-in RSS import of Wordpress to get my last 30 posts, then cherry-picked the most popular blog posts to move over based on stats and comments.  It’s a shame that I’ve couldn’t migrate any of the comments over, but hey, I guess it’s better than nothing.

I always knew that Wordpress was extremely powerful, but in the last few days, I’m really beginning to appreciate how much you can really do with it.  I love the widgets support, as well as all the freely avalaible themes there are out there.  I went through about 15 themes before I settled on the Yaletown theme that I’m currently using. Ironically, the creator of this theme lives in my hometown and the shot he’s using for the banner is a picture of where my parent’s currently live.  Talk about a perfect fit!

 I’ve been mucking with customization of my blog to add more widgets and such, but there is still a long way to go. Here’s my to-do list for the next week or so when I can find the time after work: 

1. Go through my migrated blog posts and update the URLs from spaces.live.com to  local urls
2. Add a “top posts” widget
3. Integrate google adsense
4. Change the stock banner shot to one of my own photos. I already have a few shortlisted that I think will work
5. Get rid of categories in favor of a tag cloud.

Goodbye Spaces, hello Wordpress!