Nobody to rescue me,
Nobody would dare,
I was going down for the last time,
But by His mercy I’ve been spared
- SAVED

An interesting play by FatWire. Our knights in shining armour have heard the shrill cries of distress from the damsels stuck at the top of Tower Vignette and Tower Interwoven and have gallantly offered to migrate them away to the safety of Castle FatWire for free. The name of the package (FatWire Rescue Program) implies the damsels are in serious trouble. According to the press release, they have a lot to worry about:

This limited-time program enables organizations that are constrained by the rigidity of their current legacy WCM products, or concerned about the future direction of their current WCM vendor

I love the sneaky use of the word legacay here. Vignette and Interwoven are suddenly legacy simply because they’ve been bought by OpenText and Autonomy respectively? Looking forward to seeing a response from VIGN/OTEX and IWOV/AU.  Interwoven is the fastest growing ECM vendor and Vignette, despite recent troubles, are still fighting and releasing some cool new things. They certainly aren’t legacy in my books.

It is going to be cheap and painless to migrate. No license costs! Woot! The press release tells us that

The program enables customers of these recently acquired companies to upgrade to FatWire’s industry-leading solutions at no license cost, when they employ FatWire’s proven migration tools and services that reduce the risk and increase the speed of migration.

Oh, wait, maybe it isn’t that cheap at all. Our knight comes with strings attached. You need to use FatWire’s migration tools. These come in the form of partnerships with Vamosa and Kapow, two heavy hitters in the world of automated content migration. My first observation here is that these two, while both offering an excellent service, normally compete with each other. So I’d be interested in learning more about the way a company (or FatWire) decides which of the two products to run with. My second observation is that both of these products can come with a reasonably large price tag. I presume the model here is that FatWire will take some cut of the migration cost in return for referring customers to Vamosa or Kapow.

The other piece of the revenue pie will come from the associated implementation services, either from FatWire Professional Services or an implementation partner. As Irina mentioned earlier today, implementing a CMS costs more than buying a CMS. And what if it isn’t only a CMS in the mix. For example, you might have Vignette Portal in there too. Or one of Autonomy Interwoven’s many other products. FatWire don’t have a product suite to replace all of these components quite yet, so this offer seems to focus primarily on customers that only use the WCM product from their current vendor.

I don’t know enough about this offering to guess whether this migration will only cover the content management and migration aspects. Any delivery side “migration” will involve a significant amount of work. Maybe FatWire already have tools in place that can either statically deploy the same files generated by a baked Interwoven site, or replace the Vignette/Interwoven API with the FatWire one for fried sites.  All three products have a Java API so at least we don’t need to worry about language-level changes too.

Maybe this is a marketing stunt. I received my email from FatWire marketing as the announcement was made. But maybe it is a genuine way for customers to save time and money if they are planning to migrate from their current platform. FatWire is a solid choice (Forrester just patted them on the back in the WCM for External Sites wave) and the content migration products are industry leaders.

The Forrester Wave™: Web Content Management For External Sites, Q2 2009

If you are considering this option, I’d love to hear more from you once you know the costs involved and how the process will operate. They are many ways that this could work, and it’s all going to come out in the wash.

On a night like this
I can’t get any sleep,
The air is so cold outside
And the snow’s so deep.
- ON A NIGHT LIKE THIS

Well, it just is. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a fair bit these days, normally in the middle of the night. I’ve been burned a couple of times recently by extremely unpleasant content migrations, and extremely unpleasant nappy changes. For those on the other side of the pond, a nappy is a diaper.

Some of the similarities are:

• The content is often extremely difficult to classify, and the consistency of the content is extremely variable
• Bad content never smells very good regardless of the quality of the repository you try to store it in
• Sometimes the state of the content is a symptom of some other illness
• You never have all the tools you need within easy reach, and it gets really messy if you don’t know what you are doing
• There is always more content than you thought was possible, and if the system is in a bad state, the content export can take much longer than expected
• There is no chance you can completely automate it
• It often involves running scripts throughout the night – it is never just a day job
• You thought it was out of scope until you find yourself doing it
• Shortly after you think you’ve finished migrating the content, you find more content to migrate

Trust me. I’ve migrated a lot of content, and I’ve changed a lot of nappies. Fortunately, there is one big difference – it is much harder to extract the content from the source than to put it into the target repository. Thankfully, when changing a nappy, the content only comes out. And content never pisses in your eye.

Ah, my friends from the prison, they ask unto me,
“How good, how good does it feel to be free?”
And I answer them most mysteriously,
“Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?”
- BALLAD IN PLAIN D

So, as you can see we’ve moved. About two weeks ago I decided to start this blog. A few hours and a few beers later, I was up and running on the hosted WordPress.com site. Picked the theme that I disliked least from the 17 or so available, and sprouted my first post. A couple of days later people that I didn’t even know started reading it, which was all very exciting.

It was about that time I realised that although WordPress.com is easy, it also sucks the big one if you want flexibility. The things that annoyed me in a week included:

• I have to pay to change the CSS. Probably a good things as my CSS is terrible and I’ll just make things worse, but I demand the right to change my CSS anyway.
• I have to pay to remove adverts. Fair enough I guess. In a moment of purity, I paid this for a year. Which was $30 down the toilet in retrospect.
• The built in analytics are horrible. I’m not actually sure what they mean. Of the 3,500 “Page Views” I’ve been told I’ve had since this has been live, I suspect 3,450 were from me, and the rest from me mum. Not even close to Google Analytics on the functionality front.
• The themes are inflexible. For example, I wanted to show only excerpts on my home page, not full stories. No-can-do with the theme I chose, I’m afraid. And the one line PHP change was beyond my control.
• I started to discover lots of cool plugins written by clever people, but I couldn’t touch them.

So yesterday we moved everything. I hope the migration has gone okay. I’ve chosen a theme I prefer. I’ve lost one comment, and it seems all the nesting of the existing comments. I’m going to see if I can h4x0r those back. I think all the existing deep links to the old jonontech.wordpress.com domain will actually still work. And the RSS feed is fixed with the auto-discovery feed matching the advertised feed. Thanks a million to James for helping me with this, seeing I couldn’t CSS or PHP my way out of a brown paper bag.

We had a few issues. My current hosting provider, it turns out, can’t support multiple host headers to my Linux VM, so that attempt failed. Then I tried my free GoDaddy hosting that came with my domain registration. Turns out that my account was incompatible with WordPress because “WordPress can only run on a paid hosting service”. Bastards! So I’ve coughed up my few dollars a month and, in the end, it was all remarkably easy. I also had to buy another WordPress.Com add-on so I could set up the deep link redirect to my new domain. Ching ching. That’s now $45 to WordPress. About a year’s hosting cost.

To be honest, I do think WordPress.com is pretty good. But, if you want flexibility and like WordPress, don’t be lazy like yours truly. Make the effort to host the thing yourself. Biggest blogging mistake I ever made.