Second Negative

And, we’re back!

Well, the two week long transition from Blogware to WordPress is more or less complete. More if you don’t find too many errors, and less if everything looks like crap. It took longer to go live than it should have, mainly due to a sudden preoccupation with work, and partially because I’m addicted to the Olympics. Things should be in working order, but I only guarantee reliability on par with the latest “Dream Team”.

There were a number of reasons that I switched from a hosted account with Blogware to running my own site with WordPress, but I won’t bore you with all of them. It mainly came down to flexibility, cost, and my desire to move towards a standards compliant, CSS based (non-tables) site.

My initial goal was to re-create my old site, using XHTML, CSS, and PHP. The default template that WP comes with isn’t really good for much. And by that, I don’t mean you can’t use the default template if you want to, only that I couldn’t learn much from it. After a couple of failed attempts to patch something together using ill conceived templates found around the web, I downloaded Gemini, a two column layout developed by Root. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that most of what I understand about WP, I came to understand while studying Gemini and experimenting with the customized PHP and CSS files included. Using that experience, I was able to construct my own site. There are a few tweaks from the old version, including a wider content area, font changes, etc.

Rather than blather on endlessly, I’ll just mention some of the customizations I’ve implemented during the building process.

• I’m using the Recent Posts plug-in by Nick Momrik to display the “Latest Entries” in the menu (sidebar).
• I have altered the comments code to alternate the color of each comment. I learned how by reading Kitten’s Project Blog.
• I turned the trackback address into a link, because of size and spacing issues. Some say this will confuse people, while others think that anyone who knows what a trackback is for, won’t be confused. I agree with others.
• I created an About page that mirrors the About page on the old site.
• I created a custom Archives page that includes a search function, and a breakdown of posts by month and category. I have also employed “Nicer Archives” as developed by Mark at Weblog Tools Collection. This allows users to sort/filter the archives by post title. It may prove to be overkill, but I’m interested in supplying several ways to access older content.
• The default functionality of the WordPress search returns a page of all posts that match the supplied criteria. Coming from Blogware, I preferred a system that worked more like Google, where a separate page displayed search results with titles and a short blurb. I was able to implement a similar feature that displays results in list format with title and blurb, based on a tutorial at noscope, and code from Weblog Tools Collection and Synapse. The search feature can be accessed through the Archives page and from the sidebar.
• I created a Contact page based on a simple script that is compatible with the restrictions of my web host. I can’t find the script author link, but I’ll post it when I do.
• And, for a variety of reasons, I decided to separate my photo gallery from the blog. I liked that the Blogware photo gallery was integrated, and initially considered a WP plug-in called Pictoralis, that has similar features. The main reason for the separation is so that people (family, friends) can visit the photo site without being subjected to the blog content. I tested several gallery packages before I found iPap 0.7, written by Markku Seguerra. The relative simplicity and easy customization of iPap makes it a fantastic application for my needs. If you have time, stop by Marrku’s site and take a look at some of his other wonderful projects.

And, that’s it. Okay, not really. But those are the larger areas of customization that I’ve managed to keep track of. I’d like to thank everyone that emailed words of support during the downtime, particularly Nik and Erik, whose sites I enjoy very much. I’d also like to thank Ari, whose design inspired me to go in a different direction during the early days of the original site. And last, but certainly not least, I have to thank Chris Pederick, who wrote the Web Developer extension for Firefox. If I understand anything at all about CSS positioning, I owe it all to Chris.

This is currently the only post, but that will soon change. I’m working with an RSS import tool to bring in all entries from the Blogware site. I hope to have that completed in a few days. Until then, it is an archive of one. If you were linked to the old site, make sure you remove the /blog for the new WP site. You’ll also need to update your RSS feed if you were a subscriber.

I’m still in the process of cleaning up code, and testing various things. If anything breaks, please let me know.

Thanks for visiting.