I am contemplating moving Angry Learner from TypePad over to WordPress (or something else). The reasons to switch have to be good to overcome the inertia of my laziness. (In short: speed, flexibility, cost.)

Certainly, in the process, URLs are probably going to completely bonk and other things will fail. The questions I pose to my 5 readers:

1. How stressed should I be about maintaining URLs?
2. Do URLs themselves need to be meaningful? (I am thinking ID style urls to combat question #1 in the future)
3. WordPress is dead simple to get going (and keep up) on my account on Dreamhost. Should I consider alternatives? (I would probably use Textpattern if they offered it as a 1-click install as an alternative.)

Thanks, in advance, for your advice.

Comments

[Sencer]

> a 1-click install as an
> alternative

Be aware that you need to be able to update the software for the maintenance releases anyway, and AFAIK there is no one-click option for that. Running outdated software out there in the public, puts you and others at risk (the older the software, the higher the risk generally). And the more popular the software the more likely someone's going to take advantage of it.

[Manton Reece]

I haven't used the one-click install for WordPress, but the one for phpBB is pretty good about handling bug fix updates as well. The ease of maintenance may be reason enough for you to choose WordPress over something else.

However, my suggestion would be to stay with TypePad unless there is something broken about it for you. Switching blogging systems is a pain even with semi-open export formats. It will take at least a few hours, more if you want to preserve URLs. It took me at least a full day of hacking to preserve URL formats between Radio Userland to an early Movable Type release, and again when upgrading to the latest Movable Type 3.x. But it was worth it for me.

In your case you haven't been blogging too often, so your incoming links may point more to your domain than to an individual post. If that's the case then the extra effort isn't justified, but you should still design URLs with the future in mind.

Always use meaningful URLs. Unique IDs in URLs make it impossible to preserve URLs if you do want to later. If the URL contains the first few words of a post, you'll always be able to keep the same links later (it may not be easy, but it will be possible). Also, it's very useful to be able to tell what the post is about from the URL alone.

Good luck!

[Willie Abrams]

The 1-click installs at DreamHost handle upgrades as well. It is very smooth.

As for URLs, I would almost think that IDs would be easier to preserve than words in a post, as different blog engines have different algorithms to create the URL.

The notion of being able to tell what the post is about from the URL - I can see how that would be useful.

[Tom]

I rolled my own. Now if I want a feature, I just add it.