off we go

So after dorking around with WordPress over the past 48 hours, the decision has been made.
Movable Type loses.
This is the second and possibly the third time that MT has released a non-beta version of their software with damned-near no support for it (most of the online documentation still refers to a 4.xx version), and I am simply tired of it. It might seem as though the commenting submission delay was something of an inconsequential item to get my hackles up over, but believe me when I say that this is the culmination of four years of fighting with, arguing with, and trying to fix my MT installation.
Consider the camel’s back broken.
So as of this post, comments and trackbacks to this webpage have been suspended, and no further posting will take place until the conversion has been completed. All backups have been made (I hope), and the WordPress installation will be operational as soon as I can get everything happy and working again. The theme may be completely wrong, and there may be things missing from various pages, but over the next few days, I should be able to put everything back more-or-less where I found it, and we will progress into version 3.0 of “walls of the city”.
A few quick notes. First, RSS and Atom feed addresses are currently http://www.wallsofthecity.net/rss.xml and http://www.wallsofthecity.net/atom.xml, respectively. Those syndication addresses will be changing to http://www.wallsofthecity.net/feed/ and http://www.wallsofthecity.net/feed/atom/. There will be a “fix”, of sorts, discussed later in the post, but please update your RSS/Atom readers and bookmarks appropriately.
Second, category archives will be packing up their bags and moving as well – their addresses were http://www.wallsofthecity.net/category_name_here/, and they will be changing to http://www.wallsofthecity.net/category/category_name_here/. For the vast majority of you, that will not make a difference, but I am simply being thorough.
Third, Movable Type uses underscores (“_”) to take the place of spaces in post hyperlinks, while WordPress uses hyphens (“-”). After exporting all of the posts and comments from Movable Type and importing them into WordPress, I will be running a SQL query that will replace all of the hyphens WP automatically adds to the addresses with underscores. However, I might miss one or two, due to strange circumstances – if a direct link fails, check your underscores/hyphens. Future posts will use hyphens.
Fourth, current direct links to comments in posts previous to the next one will no longer work, at all. There is no fix for this, and I apologize for that.
So, the fix for the feeds? I am going to be delving into the RewriteEngine available in .htaccess files onboard Apache webservers (like mine), and including the following code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^index.xml$ feed/ [NC, R=301]
RewriteRule ^atom.xml$ feed/atom/ [NC, R=301]
RewriteRule ^category_name_here(.*)$ category/category_name_here$1 [NC,QSA,R=301, L]

Now, if my understanding of this particuliar aspect of voodoo is accurate, those middle two lines should redirect browsers and other users from the old RSS/Atom files to the new quasi-folders where the feeds currently reside, and the last line (when replicated the sufficient number of times for all categories on the webpage) should redirect from one folder to another, whether someone accesses the folder directly or a file within it. Of course, I could be wrong – I was relying extensively on these various sources of information (rather than actual experience or training with the RewriteEngine), so if anyone sees any errors in that code, please point them out (in an email to “linoge (at) wallsofthecity (dot) net”, since comments will be deactivated). Likewise, I make no guarantees that this RewriteEngine script will work with anything other than web-browsers, so especially for those of you who use desktop RSS readers/aggregators, please update your RSS/Atom links.
Bleh. I hate moving.
I will put up another post at the end of all of this letting you all know that we made it intact. Wish me luck?