# Switching to Wordpress


By Ben Ramsey

Published on August 9, 2004


When you hit my site today, you probably noticed a few different things. The first thing you noticed may have been that you were whisked away to a new URL. The second, and most noticable, thing was the new design.

_Why the new location and look?_ you ask.

_Because I wanted a nice, PHP-powered blog,_ I reply.

Yes, now I am running [Wordpress](http://wordpress.org), a full-featured blogging suite, that includes all those fancy pings and trackbacks that bloggers have come to love. This time, however, I'm running it with style in PHP---along with the nice [GNU GPL](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#GPL) (two features that [Movable Type](http://www.movabletype.org/), my previous software, did not have).

Don't be dismayed, however. Despite the fact that I have moved the location of my articles and am using new software, I have set up [Apache](http://httpd.apache.org/) [Redirect](http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_alias.html#redirect) directives for every page in my "old" site. So, there will be no broken links to my site; just be sure to update your links to the new pages over the next few months. I have yet to move many of the older postings over, and I will be doing that over the next few weeks, but they are still available [on the old archives page](/blog/), and I will implement Redirects for the pages as I move them.

I hope you find this new site better, more easily navigable, and just downright more _sexy_ than the previous one.