Monday, July 10, 2006
Swtiching from Blogger to Wordpress
My digital life over the last two months has been limited by the lack of a laptop. In my madness I thought this was a great time to try rebuilding Our Crazy Travels from scratch on a new platform and kick-start writing.
Success on one count: Our Crazy Travels has been thrown together on the new system. I'm running it on WordPress 2 and the K2 mod. It think it looks good and now I have lappy back I have the chance to debug it.
Future changes for OCT:
* Fixing the map / possibly changing to roll-over -> click, rather than bubbles
* Adding more photo galleries (using fgallery for this).
* Linking in-post photos to the galleries (this is functional for all new posts)
* Adding PoMMo to handle the mailing list
I'm hoping to avoid needing comment verification, but I might have to. We'll see how the spam pans out.
Will I move aletheia to WP? Eventually yes, it's got a lot more scope than Blogger. It'll be a project for next year while I see how both blogs develop.
The only major problem with the move was importing posts and comments from Blogger. The importer didn't work (six weeks of trying!) and I ended up doing it all manually over four days.
Big thanks to Salis, again, for advise, answering endless questions and helping out when I couldn't code my way out of a brown paper bag. Which was almost always.
Call me crazy? Now that I've moved one, here are some reasons to explain why I will move the second.
Tagging
The lack of tagging/categorisation in blogger will be a big motivator. Tagging is quickly becoming the way to identify and search for things. My email inbox and Apple hard-drive is full of tags!
In our travel blog, each country is a category. I can also manipulate the slug, for example www.mars-hill.co.nz/country/greece will take you to our posts on Greece (I changed "tags" to "country").
Aletheia covers all sorts of topics and I've tried using del.icio.us to manage them (see the drop down menu in the sidebar) but it's time consuming. A built in categorizer/tagger is a must.
Pages
WP has easy to add "pages" which differ from posts in that they are static. They can be front pages or secondary pages. They can be visible or only open by links. Public or password protected. This means one can build a whole site on WP. Try doing that with blogger -- or even getting a nice looking integration with the rest of your site.
Comment interface
It's a bit easier to manipulate the comment interface in WP than in blogger. K2, which I'm using, also offers ajax comments meaning the page refreshes in a live, while you watch, way. It doesn't reload the page.
Comment information
When you get a new comment on blogger the email that is sent to you is useless. It doesn't give you the sender's email address; even though they often enter it!! Yes, two exclamation points!! In addition to what Blogger gives you, WP includes:
And that's quite a bit!
Sidebars
Sidebars, along with headers, footers and font-size, etc can be changed according to page, topic or author. All sorts of customisation.
PHP vs static HTML
Blogger generates pages for individual posts and monthly archives. You can view them like that. WP stores all the information in a database and calls it when required. This allows the data to be displayed in many different kinds of ways and different kinds of groupings as well as "teasers" or excerpts.
All-in-all worth the effort of learning a new interface and getting one's hand dirty with the code. (There are plenty of templates for those that don't want to.)
Success on one count: Our Crazy Travels has been thrown together on the new system. I'm running it on WordPress 2 and the K2 mod. It think it looks good and now I have lappy back I have the chance to debug it.
Future changes for OCT:
* Fixing the map / possibly changing to roll-over -> click, rather than bubbles
* Adding more photo galleries (using fgallery for this).
* Linking in-post photos to the galleries (this is functional for all new posts)
* Adding PoMMo to handle the mailing list
I'm hoping to avoid needing comment verification, but I might have to. We'll see how the spam pans out.
Will I move aletheia to WP? Eventually yes, it's got a lot more scope than Blogger. It'll be a project for next year while I see how both blogs develop.
The only major problem with the move was importing posts and comments from Blogger. The importer didn't work (six weeks of trying!) and I ended up doing it all manually over four days.
Big thanks to Salis, again, for advise, answering endless questions and helping out when I couldn't code my way out of a brown paper bag. Which was almost always.
Why move from Blogger to Wordpress
Call me crazy? Now that I've moved one, here are some reasons to explain why I will move the second.
Tagging
The lack of tagging/categorisation in blogger will be a big motivator. Tagging is quickly becoming the way to identify and search for things. My email inbox and Apple hard-drive is full of tags!
In our travel blog, each country is a category. I can also manipulate the slug, for example www.mars-hill.co.nz/country/greece will take you to our posts on Greece (I changed "tags" to "country").
Aletheia covers all sorts of topics and I've tried using del.icio.us to manage them (see the drop down menu in the sidebar) but it's time consuming. A built in categorizer/tagger is a must.
Pages
WP has easy to add "pages" which differ from posts in that they are static. They can be front pages or secondary pages. They can be visible or only open by links. Public or password protected. This means one can build a whole site on WP. Try doing that with blogger -- or even getting a nice looking integration with the rest of your site.
Comment interface
It's a bit easier to manipulate the comment interface in WP than in blogger. K2, which I'm using, also offers ajax comments meaning the page refreshes in a live, while you watch, way. It doesn't reload the page.
Comment information
When you get a new comment on blogger the email that is sent to you is useless. It doesn't give you the sender's email address; even though they often enter it!! Yes, two exclamation points!! In addition to what Blogger gives you, WP includes:
IP:
E-mail :
URL : (their website)
Whois :
To delete this comment, visit:
And that's quite a bit!
Sidebars
Sidebars, along with headers, footers and font-size, etc can be changed according to page, topic or author. All sorts of customisation.
PHP vs static HTML
Blogger generates pages for individual posts and monthly archives. You can view them like that. WP stores all the information in a database and calls it when required. This allows the data to be displayed in many different kinds of ways and different kinds of groupings as well as "teasers" or excerpts.
All-in-all worth the effort of learning a new interface and getting one's hand dirty with the code. (There are plenty of templates for those that don't want to.)
Craig (mars-hill) Monday, July 10, 2006
