So it has been just under a week since I moved everything over here from Radio. Here’s what I really like so far:

• I don’t have to fire up my laptop to post. I can do it from any networked device.
• I’ve got tons of space as opposed to the 40MB included with Radio.
• The technology foundation is more intuitive. It’s LAMP-based so there are a lot of resources available. Radio Userland is based on Frontier which is not nearly as ubiquitous as LAMP.
• Similar to the prior point, I love that it uses a relational back-end. I don’t have to re-publish pages when I change the look-and-feel. And the model is more like what I’m used to. Front-end web page talks to back-end database. Simple. I get it.
• My aggregator is for aggregating and my blog tool is for blogging. The built-in RSS aggregator in Radio is okay, but I didn’t want to have to fire up Radio to check my feeds. Sometimes I’d use Sage, but, again, I’d have to fire up Radio if I came across something post-worthy. Now, I use Sage all of the time–I hit the bookmarklet to post and I’m there.

In my early days of Radio I thought it might be a good tool to roll out internally. That was before I had been exposed to the server-based blog tools. And, quite honestly, I think I was forgetting the lesson we’ve all already learned about distributing and maintaining client apps versus running them on a centrally-managed server infrastructure with a thin client.

I’ll grant that it is extremely easy to set up a public blog with Radio. I tweaked my config to publish to both a public site and an internal site and that was straightforward for a technical user. When I think about folks in our sales organization making those same tweaks and maybe wanting to customize their templates, I think about what Walter said to Smokey in The Big Lebowski, “You are entering a world of pain.”

I imagine Userland’s answer to this would be, “You are right. For a big intranet project you should use Manila, our server-based product.” Maybe so. But you’d still have to bone up on Frontier.

Anyway, I’m not trying to dog Radio here. I’m just excited about my choice to switch.

This is a general white paper on good blogging practices. McGee calls it a “corporate” blogging resource (his post). But don’t be confused between a public-facing corporate blog and a blog for internal knowledge management purposes. Still, I agree it is worth a read and probably good to circulate amongst managers who haven’t drank the kool-aid yet.

Okay. I think everything is moved over from the old Radio Userland blog. The stories were the most painful due to a lapse in clear-thinking–at some point I started using MS Word to edit the stories prior to pasting them into Radio. So I had a bunch of Word-specific HTML to clean up. The posts imported smoothly.

Here’s a summary of what I did:

1. Moved images to gallery. This gave me an excuse to try out Gallery and gives me a decent way to manage the images I reference from stories and posts.

2. Moved stories by hand, cleaning up HTML and changing out IMG references to gallery. This would have been a decent job for a Perl script but I didn’t have that many to move. (While prowling around I found some old stories that Radio was no longer publishing for some reason. Thanks, Radio!).

3. Imported mySubscriptions.opml into blogroll.

4. Created categories to match old categories. As it turns out, this wasn’t necessary. The RSS importer creates categories for imported posts as it needs to.

5. Added rewrite rule to .htaccess to try to address any links in my posts:

RewriteRule ^/0117027/categories/xml/([0-9]{4})/(.*).html /newbloglocation/archives/$1/$2 [R=permanent]

6. Updated the UTC time offset in my WordPress options. (I just hadn’t had a chance to do it until now).

7. Edited /www/wp-admin/import-rss.php to tell it the name of the XML file to import.

8. Wrote an XSLT stylesheet to filter unwanted post categories. I was using Radio to post to my public blog as well as an internal server at Navigator. The XSL simply transformed the existing RSS into a “public” version without the internal categories. I used Perl to recursively cruise through the Radio backup posts directory structure and transform the XML.

9. Uploaded the transformed RSS files to the site and ran the import-rss.php script.

I’ve probably got more cleanup to do but at least it is all moved over.