Considering WordPress
Since the initial launch of this site, every line of code has been painstakingly hand-written by me. Every little bit of it was hand-crafted to do more or less whatever I wanted it to do. It's evolved from a few measly lines of inefficient ASP to several thousand (in total) lines of PHP. I have a custom content management system allowing me to post entries and you to comment on them, allowing me to edit posts and comments, even allowing each new entry to update an RSS feed. I'm proud of it. It's my baby.
But it's still not all that efficient, and it's not very outsider-friendly. Any updates I make are painfully difficult to implement because I have to go through all my code and make sure everything still works. It's getting harder and harder to deal with comment spam, although I dare say I've done a decent job of it so far. So I'm considering migrating all my content to WordPress. I've got it installed already, and I've been playing around with the options. It shouldn't too difficult to switch over. Obviously it'll take me a while to get the theme of the site looking like it should, so I'll be spending some time with the CSS figuring things out. My biggest problem is going to be finding a way to move the entries from my existing database to the WordPress database, which takes an entirely different form. I'm working on that as I type — I'm taking a break from coding a conversion tool to write this.
Hopefully all this effort will be worth my time. If nothing else, it gives me something to do while I wait to hear back from my prospective employer (hopefully tomorrow morning).
AwesomeSauce said,
October 18, 2006, 11:17 pm
I'm proud of you, man. I've mostly only known about HTML for the past few years, yet I have not gone far enough as to really learn PHP. I don't even know that much about CSS.
I might find a blogger template I like a lot on the internet, and I can usually make several drastic changes to it as I want.. but designing it from scratch? I'm not really up to that.
Le sigh.. instead of webscripting, I guess I'd better start learning more on what I REALLY wanna do.. develope software. C++, I suppose.
Tigerblade said,
October 19, 2006, 1:49 am
Wow. Holy crap. I did it. It was a lot of… interesting… work, but I managed to write converters to move all the content (entries and comments) over to the new database.
Now I just need to play with the design a bit to get it looking not-default-wordpress, and we'll see where it goes from there.
MrEggsalad said,
October 20, 2006, 6:51 am
Yeah, just make sure it is un-wordpressy. Give it your style! I personally have never messed with Word-Press skins and themes or whatever they are, but, from what you are saying it looks just to be some CSS which shouldn't be too hard to figure out. (I did Xanga and MySpace.. :P ) Good luck!