I’ve finally taken the plunge and updated my weblog. Previously, I used my own RSS class, written in PHP many years ago. Posting to my blog involved editing an XML file which was then parsed into RSS and for the website. Pretty urgh altogether.
I’ve now moved over all the content to a wordpress install and integrated it with my website. It looks like a smooth transition right now, I kept the old mechanism in place (so URLs do not become invalid) and was able to import all my old posts (192) into wordpress. The old system was lacking a couple of things, and was in fact very 1990’s. New features in my blog are:
- Comments. This wasn’t possible with the old system and something I’ve been missing for quite some time.
- Search
- OpenId login for posting comments
- Categories
- All the other goodness wordpress brings
The most important thing to me is a better blogging workflow though. I’m using Bilbo Blogger as local client. It provides a nicer wysiwyg editor, is able to save posts locally (and should work fine offline, I tend to write blogs on trains). It also makes adding pictures to your blog a lot less cumbersome. You can just refer to images on your local disk and bilbo will upload the image and change the link accordingly. There’s also spell-checking and previewing. Pretty nice and fairly silky.
All this didn’t go without the necessary hitch. An old post and an empty one popped up on the planets. Sorry for that!
Nice being able to comment :)
And thanks for all your KDE work btw!
Dude! Finally I don’t have to track you down on IRC to comment :p About time you updated. Nice to know about Bilbo with the images, as I didn’t know that and I have been using it off and on.
Great to see somebody migrate to WordPress again :) How did you migrate? Write a script to import the posts? Just copy the database records?
“Comments. This wasn’t possible with the old system and something I’ve been missing for quite some time.”
We missed it too ;) Thanks for making the switch! :)
@Frank: I’ve taken the RSS feed with all my entries and imported it using WordPress’ import RSS plugin. It was mostly painless.
Great! Moreover, I am using Bilbo as well and it definitely rocks.
You have a bug in your screenshot – look behind the lower part of the window. The shadow is cut off.
@Nasak: Yes, that’s a bug in the trunk/ Version of the window shadows. It’s been fixed in the meantime. Thanks for noting it, though.