Warning, I've had a few beers and I'm rambling.

So. Why did I move? A combination of reasons really. The general clunkiness of . The inability to update unless I had my laptop with me. The insuficient access logs from Userland's server. The annoyance of being “0100190” instead of using the domain I've owned for five years now. The artificial separation of my two weblogs. Inertia.

But I'm here now. I have given up what is a pretty influential position with Google, even after the update, to forge out under my own name.

Movable Type looks bloody good so far. It seems very full-featured, very easy to use, and it didn't take very long to set up at all (although I'm not sure how that would translate to someone who hadn't once made a living as a Perl programmer and Unix sysadmin). The instructions are comprehensive, and the interface is very elegant.

I need to write my own page templates, though. I'll probably base it on my livejournal template, but that's a job for next weekend.

Exporting from Radio took a while. I found a tool that would do the job for me here, but whoever wrote it (a) knows nothing about localisation, and (b) got it wrong anyway. I made a huge number of false starts because the MT importing format wants dates to be mm/dd/yyyy, but the exporter writes them out (at least on my machine) as d/m/yy. Also, MT expects a newline between BODY: and the body of a post, but the exporter doesn't deliver. Luckily, that's all the sort of thing that can be solved with regular expressions.

Exporting from Livejournal took a lot less time. I wrote the first part of a Java library for talking to Livejournal in January. On top of that, the exporter was only 130 lines of code. It was fun watching STDOUT as my journal was exported. I commented to Lonita that it was “like watching your life flash before your eyes in fast-forward”

So The Fishbowl is a merging of The Fishbowl Diaries with The Desktop Fishbowl. I'm not sure how merging my personal and geeky writings is going to work out. It works for Mark Pilgrim, but he's quite a bit more eloquent than I am. In the near future I shall create categorised RSS feeds, so people can subscribe to what they're interested in, and no more.