I’ve switched my software over to WordPress. This was long overdue, as anyone who ever wanted to read anything at all on this site probably knows. Sometime I should really write an article reflecting on the failures of my previous blog software. Lets just say that flat files aren’t so hot either.
Now that my software doesn’t suck, I have lots of posts I have been embarrassed to write because every new post potentially introduced new people to my crappy site.
Hopefully everything is setup correctly, redirects, archives, and the new feed.
My one worry is WordPress comments, which suck a bit. They shouldn’t collect the horrible quantity of spam that the old site has, so that’s good, but I hate disconnected streams of comments. I’ve tried to modify the theme on this site to be more roomy, with less of the excessive whitespace that has become the norm. I hope this whitespace kick goes the way of Creating Killer Websites Using Table Based Layout. I.e., it’ll soon look dated and everyone will move on. So I hope you’ll have more than two inches of width to comment in. Honestly I wonder if I should just ditch WordPress comments and use something else entirely, like some kind of forum software and rig in some way of including the comments in the theme. I wanted to install threaded comments, but the installation process is rather invasive.
For editing I turned TinyMCE off (ugh), and installed a restructured text plugin. It took a while to figure out, since I have to include .. -*- mode: rst -*- in the header of each post. Oh well, a minor inconvenience. I used Text Control to enable Markdown in comments, but I had to replace the actual markdown.php it used, which was broken.
Peter Ebenhoch | 02-Aug-07 at 4:52 am | Permalink
Hi Ian,
where did your old posting go:
http://blog.ianbicking.org/where-smalltalk-went-wrong-2.html?version=0
I was directed there from this site: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/blog/blogView.
Could you put it online again?
Thanks, Peter
Ian Bicking | 02-Aug-07 at 9:24 am | Permalink
For some reason my .htaccess files are being periodically clobbered, which breaks all my old files. It’s back up at the moment, and I’m sure I’ll get it fixed properly soon.
Adrian Holovaty | 02-Aug-07 at 9:53 am | Permalink
Oh, thank goodness for the new software. I’m looking forward to your backlog of entries.
Matthew Scott | 02-Aug-07 at 10:32 am | Permalink
Ian, I’m glad you dig the reStructuredText plugin. It must not suck too badly since it was able to survive major version jumps in WordPress. :-) We both have Bob Ippolito to thank for making it suck less, of course.
Looking forward to hearing more about your old blog. I’ve been long curious about what software it was running, since there was no readily-apparent resources to find out more about it.
beza1e1 | 02-Aug-07 at 3:33 pm | Permalink
I think your old blog was fine. Well, good luck with PHP ;)
Thankage | 02-Aug-07 at 7:38 pm | Permalink
Thank you.
Ben Finney | 05-Aug-07 at 8:19 pm | Permalink
Your feed is finally back (the only way I knew that you’d posted anything since June) as of 2007-08-05. It even presents items in the same order as every other blog now :-)