Switching to WP
I’ve switched to WordPress. I didn’t want to use my own custom blogging tool anymore, as it lacked a lot of features that I wanted, and I couldn’t be bothered writing those features myself.
A short recap of the switch:
- Importing entries was a piece of cake. I wrote a short script that exported all the entries from my custom tool, using the MovableType format. This meant all the comments have also been imported. The only thing that I didn’t import were trackbacks, due to a bug in WP’s import script. It’s an easy fix, but I noticed too late, and I only had a few trackbacks, so it’s not worth doing it again.
- Installing WordPress was extremely easy and fast as well. It took about 2 seconds
- Unfortunately, I got stuck with a weird cookie problem, which caused my WP install to not work. I spent several hours trying to get it to work, to no avail. I posted the WP Support Forums, where I got quick help. It seemed everyone else *could* view my blog, so it had to be something on my part. I quickly figured out cookies were to blame. I solved the problem within 2 minutes, and got everything up and running.
- So far I’m loving WordPress all the way. There’s a few things that annoy me (e.g. why is there PHP in the templates?) but it’s 10x better than my custom tool
- I’m stick with this default style for a while, at least until I find a new one that looks better. I can’t be bothered creating my own one.
- I’m going to be downloading a few plugins in the next few weeks, and hopefully create some neat hacks for myself. I’ve already got one great idea.
March 26th, 2005 at 5:43 am
Its a bit weird, you say that your own tool lacks a lot of features.
That isn’t smart.
And it looks nice indeed.
April 7th, 2005 at 3:44 am
The reason that there is PHP in the templates is because they’re not using a silly template system. Templating systems are slow, inefficient, and for the most part, they’re sloppy.
PHP in and of itself is meant for code+HTML. There’s no point in making a template engine that gives you sudocode+HTML, it’s just making more work for yourself (plus it’s a lot slower).
Having a to fetch the links.php file is a pretty decent way of doing templating. At least they’ve seperated the code from the content to an extent now, 1.2 was all mixed together, so if you installed a theme, you’d lose a modification (which was silly).
April 13th, 2005 at 1:36 pm
You can get a load of cool themes from http://www.alexking.org/software/wordpress/themes/. And there are a lot of plugins at http://dev.wp-plugins.org/browser/, the official WP Plugins repository!! But my syntax hiliter plugin is not there, so you’ll have to visit my website to get that plugin.
As you’ll be posting code, I’d say its a must have!!