I understood I would lose a few comments in the transition, but also knew I could probably salvage them from the nucleus database. In fact, I plan on doing this today. This was an acceptable cost to me. The King is very skilled at MT and has developed many elegant coding tricks for MT sites (I am not a coder, but I know enough to follow coding logic once someone else has done the work). I am quite happy with his work and would highly recommend him.
However, the biggest risks in new endeavors are the unexpected consequences. It is difficult to weigh the pros and cons of decisions when you are unaware of some of the consequences. I did not realize that switching from Nucleus to MT would void all the permalinks people have placed to my site. After all, when I switched from Blogger to Nucleus, all of my old Blogger posts still work.
Had I realized that up front, I would not have moved to MT. However, given all the time the King and I have invested in implementing my theme in MT, I am certainly going to stay with MT. Today I will also add a section on the left that references my most popular posts with their new permalinks. I regret any inconvenience this loss of old permalinks has caused my readers, but I have learned two things from this experience. One, if I ever switch to another program (doubtful), I will ensure I do so in a way that saves all permalinks. Two, as people experience unexpected consequences throughout their lives, it probably influences their thinking. After all, only a fool does not learn from experience. Thus, the law of unexpected consequences – along with personal experience with these consequences – may explain why people grow more conservative with age.
No complaints. I made the decision based upon what we both knew at the time and I do not blame you at all. Hopefully this experience will help others avoid the same problem.
That's my personal definition of wisdom. Most people learn from their own mistakes. Fools never learn. Wise folks learn from the mistakes of others.
Its an interesting theory about the Law of Unexpected Consequences. However, wouldn't it be balanced by the Law of Unexpected Benefits? You've got to admit, this site design is fantastic. Were you really expecting something this attractive when you began? Perhaps its a two part theory, which would explain why old people move toward the extremes to become either sweet souls or bitter curmudgeons
If I were you, I'd focus on that really nifty shield with the windmill design, which is definitely an "unexpected benefit", before you turn into a bitter curmudgeon :)
The design looks fantastic, although I wish I had checked in more frequently. There's nothing in this design that couldn't have been done in Nucleus, thereby preserving your old links (and also preserving the superior php/mySQL driven backend, which does some things MT's perl and static pages just can't do very easily). Sorry to see you leave the Nucleus family, although it looks sharp!
Kevin,
Glad you like the new look, thanks for the comments.
Given the benefit of hindsite, I wish I had stayed with Nucleus too. I'm sure the King would have eventually figured out how to make my Nucleus site look just like this MT version. The decision to switch was simply made on the basis of how long it would take (since the King was very familiar with MT and completely new to Nucleus). Unfortunately, neither of us realized that the permalinks would be lost.
However, there are some silver linings to the move to MT. 1) The new look was done by my blogiversary, which was one of my goals. 2) The loss of permalinks motivated me to post my most popular columns on the left. 3) It was nice lesson in the risks of change ;-)
Sorry. I didn't think about that. It is just not possible to deal with that because nucleus provides 'served' pages while MT provides hard pages.