Incoming changes

Normally I wouldn’t make a post about site changes because I don’t think it is interesting nor it is something that anybody but myself should care about. However since this is one of those changes that will affect some readers I thought I should give a heads-up.

After much thinking (and banging my head against the wall) I decided to switch the blog software from Drupal to WordPress. This also means I will drop the ability of receiving a copy of the posts via e-mail. If you want to know when a new post will be made I suggest you add the blog to an RSS reader of your choice or follow me on Twitter. I was going to add an option for receiving notifications via Facebook too but less than five minutes of using that dang thing and I gave up. Sorry, I just can’t stand Facebook. :p

By the way, for technical reasons I am keeping the comments for this post closed. I will open it for comments once everything has moved to WordPress. Also, I will be changing hosts so it might take a couple of days for everything to go back to normal. If you can’t wait that long to comment/criticize/send-death-threats on this subject you can use the contact form in the menu above or send me a Direct Message about it on Twitter.

Anyway, there are several reasons for dropping the e-mail option. The short versions is: It has been a pain in my backside in a lot of ways.

The longer version is the following:

1. Spambots have been trying to register e-mails, failing and I end up receiving error notifications about it.

A few months ago I started to receive notifications that certain e-mails were trying to register for the newsletter but failing. It was always the same e-mails and I got a  dozen of notifications a day. It just stopped when I hid the option entirely. Having to delete those notifications from my mailbox was not fun and I rather use that time for something more productive. As for why spambots would do that I have no idea. And I am pretty sure it was not humans trying it as trying to repeat a process like that a dozen times a day and failing just sounds like insanity to me. :p

2. Creating a  local development environment to make sure the newsletters are being sent has been difficulty

Before I monkey around with the site stuff I always test it in a local development environment. This way if things break only I will have to suffer through it. Now, if I only have to setup a local development environment to test stuff that is displayed in a browser that is trivial. If I also have to test the sending of newsletters that hasn’t been as easy for me in the past. So I’d rather not have to deal with that in the future and keep things as simple as possible.

3.  The script that I used to convert the blog’s content to WordPress does not convert the registered e-mails

I used a script I found in the internet to convert the blog’s content from Drupal to WordPress. It is a relatively simple script that converted the posts and comments, nothing more. That is not to say it is impossible to make a script to copy the current e-mails registered for newsletters to WordPress. It is just that I don’t have the knowledge to do so and honestly I have not the patience to figure that out now.

4. I haven’t given up on Drupal completely.

Although I think WordPress will make my life for blogging easier right now I haven’t given up on Drupal completely. I might change back to Drupal at a later date if I find myself unhappy with WordPress. If I do so then we come back to all these issues and more.

This isn’t the kind of post I wanted to break the silence with but it was either this or continue posting as normal and some people not even knowing about it. Sorry for the inconvenience to the affected parties. Normal posts will resume Soon ™.

EDIT: Comments are now open.