I have to say the Jefferson’s theme song kept going through my head this weekend as I toiled away moving this site from it’s Blogger roots to a new and improved content management system, WordPress 1.5.
For the most part I think the move was pretty seamless. There were a few spotty moments yesterday afternoon and evening, a broken RSS feed this morning, and a few refugees left back over on my old Blogger RSS feed. All in all, it could have gone a lot worse and I’m very excited to be up on this new platform.
I haven’t seen much written about it, but in my opinion the Blogger platform is going downhill. They haven’t added many new features lately, don’t support basic old blogosphere features such as trackbacks and pingbacks or categories, and when things break they generally are left unfixed. I’m sure Google has some uber-release up their sleeve or something but waiting around and hoping had become too painful. Blogger, thanks, it was fun while it lasted… you served me well. I promise to write.
As for the new stuff…this site has search! I’ve never had a decent quality, working, search function on my personal site before. I’ve been playing with it non-stop. 🙂 This site has categories. I don’t think people use categories much, but it is helpful for organizing content at least on my end and gives new readers a good place to get acquainted. You may have noticed, I’m toying around with some PHP that displays the categories down there on the bottom of each page in various font sizes based on their frequency of usage… like Flickr or Technorati tags. It’s a work in progress.
There are a lot of other fun things I’ve added and a lot more potential too to do other things with this site now that I’m on this system. I’ll spare you the minutia as I know most of you aren’t interested and those who are having probably been getting sneak peaks along the way.
I’m still smoothing out a few details, but everything is functional and a big improvement over the previous version. I learned a lot pulling it all together and hope you enjoy using it all as much as I have bringing it to life. Thanks for reading, and I hope the move wasn’t too painful on any of you.
PS. I’d be remiss if I didn’t thank Boris for harrassing me to leave the Blogger ghetto and ‘move on up’ to something else every time I’ve seen him for the last month. You were the nudge I needed man, thx.