WorldRider Website Gets Facelift

When I first set off on my WorldRider journey many years ago, the concept of blogs were still rather unknown, Facebook just opened its door to non-education audience, and Twitter was just a funny name for a confusing service its founders called micro-blogging.

At the time, the most powerful and popular blogging technology platform was Movable Type or its hosted version TypePad. What  happened since will go down in the annals of great marketing and product failures like Betamax, Rio, Creative Labs MP3 players, Winamp, Netscape and countless others.

The people behind Movable Type got greedy and dramatically changed its licensing which created a backlash among developers and bloggers worldwide. It also lacked the backing of the passion Open Source community, because it wasn’t. And it was based on Perl at a time PHP was gaining ground.

Slowly WordPress took over the blogoshere and today it is the underlying technology platform for nearly 40% of web content.

When I started the WorldRider Blog I used Movable Type. The blog grew over the years with nearly 1,000 posts and 5,000 or more photographs. It hosted podcasts, videos and more. Migrating this website from Movable Type to WordPress would be a major project. I would procrastinate and complain and even when I was ready to hire someone to do it for me, I still found reason to hold off.
The biggest problem in migration would be retaining all the links that other bloggers used on their sites to link to the WorldRider site. If I changed to WordPress, I could easily lose all those inbound links and frustrate so many others with 404 or Page Not Found errors. Even the indexes on search engines would deliver 404 errors.

The old “classic” WorldRider website on Movable Type.

I won’t bore you with further details. Suffice to say, I’ve finally migrated WorldRider to WordPress. I’ve lost a lot of sleep and perhaps even more hair (which is nearly impossible) and have frustrated and stressed myself to the point where I would yell and scream at my computer — and my car, Dar.

There is still work to do. But I hope you like the new design, simplified navigation, and its mobile-friendly layout. All the old posts are there. For now you need to use the Travelog menu and navigate to the continent you would like to read. From there you can use forward and back links at the top of the post to read chronologically. This spring I’ll add more country and timeline navigation to make it even easier.

For now, it gives me new energy and excitement to not only get back onto this blog, but onto the bike as well.

Stay tuned.