About 10 days ago the GoDaddy server we use to host our websites ($30 being cheaper than the $100 we used to pay and the $200+ that colocation would be around here) decided that they weren’t going to run Tomcat webapps anymore. They’ve always been crappy, but this time they took it to a new level with the Tomcat regularly falling over with an OutOfMemoryError before it’s had a chance to get comfortable.
Almost definitely GoDaddy’s fault btw rather than the JVM, Tomcat or Roller/JIRA - whatever Xen/VMWare style thing they run does not like Java. Running ‘java -version’ on the command line will get a not enough object heap error and when I tried to use a standard Tomcat install it could never get any memory. In the end I chose to use the one that GoDaddy supplied and it stood up somewhat happily for 6 months, then something must have changed and things died.
So, three options jump to mind. Number 1, complain to GoDaddy. I’ve read various complaints online concerning Java on GoDaddy machines and am really not in the mood for such things. I ought to send them an email, but haven’t yet. Number 2, go back to colocation. I’ve got two 1U servers sitting upstairs unused, but colocation is a pain. It means physically installing the machines, and as we live near downtown, that either means paying a lot or driving further away from downtown to find a good price. That means taking a morning or two off. Sucky. Number 3, ditch Java on the server. I was running a couple of Rollers and a JIRA. Migrating the JIRA to Code.Google has been a todo for a while, so I’ll just do that (at some point), which leaves the Rollers.
We’ve enjoyed using Roller, hopefully we will again. It has features that we’ll definitely miss; and I definitely feel safer using products that I’m confident are going to remain open source. We were using Moveable Type before moving to Roller, and the one I’ve chosen, WordPress, seems to be accused of a similar direction (Google for ‘wordpress security’).
Migrating is fun though, and it’s more fun than hassling support to get Java running again on a low-memory virtual system, or doing physical machine migration. So first up was choosing new software. Moveable Type was out - they haven’t released their return to open source version yet, and even if they did there’s a lack of trust issue to deal with there. Other Java blogs are out too. As are the free hosted services, we’re used to more control. The one that Carrie suggested via happy friends was WordPress. When this later matched with the one that coders on IRC were recommending, it was time to look at it.
Most important is data migration. I took a script from somewhere (and now can’t figure out where) that you setup as a template in Roller and executed. The idea being that it would dump your blog as wordpress.xml format; however that’s only for older Rollers (probably still JRoller) so I had to rewrite it as a JSP to get it to work on the newer Roller version. If not for the script, I suspect I would be migrating to a new physical box by now. It gave me the guts that even an evening of fighting with Velocity wasn’t enough to slow me down and make me want to drive out to Bothell with a 1U.
Next up - installing the software and importing the data. WordPress itself seemed nice and shiny, until my confused self wondered where the blogs were. Seems that it’s a uni-blog. Installing 3 or 4 seemed daft, but that was seeming to be my only hope before I wandered across WordPressMu - the software that runs wordpress.com. It looks like a big hack on top of WordPress, but I gave it a shot.
It has quirks. They turned various features off in the code. I turned one back on (in-browser theme editing). They support *.foo.domain.com, we want various different domains. This lead to some late night hacking of their login code to support the cookies. That might have been a deal-breaker usually, but we’d just finished getting the l&f right, moving to the real domains and setting up the rewrites when I discovered that we could no longer log in so rolling back was the alternative. After these changes, I’m not looking forward to the first upgrade.
I liked the feature whereby I can define the permalink structure. This lets me continue to use the Roller style url and maintain existing urls. That’ll also let us migrate back someday if I get the platform.
We’re going to miss Roller’s feature whereby comments would close after N days. I’m going to have to write a cron-job that hits the database for that I think - though always possible that one of the many plugins I hear of does that. That’s a negative of WPMu, not all plugins work.
I’ve a suspicion that spam will continue to be a problem. It’ll be interesting to see whether it’s better or worse than Roller.
License is of course an irritation. Less so for the server, but even the default theme is GPL. That sucks mightily as it might infect the themes we’re migrating as the default is the obvious example to base your new theme on. Fortunately I doubt very much that we would pull anything of value out of the theme when migrating to another server someday, instead we’ll continue to take the part we created, the theme customisations themselves.
I’m not sure how this’ll work out. It’s been an irritation to have to do this, but fun to play with something new(ish). Now I just need to avoid the other Roller committers lynching me 
