escape to insanity

You may have noticed, but the site is pretty much completely different now. There’s a reason.

I’ve finally given up and switched to a pre-made, commercially available (well, open-source) blogging software package. Wordpress recently released version 2.5, the blogosphere went crazy, and I gave in. For almost three years (almost exactly three years, actually) I got by with my own custom-built, hand-written CMS, but… it just wasn’t enough.

The CMS I’d written myself had gradually evolved over time and had eventually gotten to be relatively respectable, all things considered. I had even been working on a new version, based very extensively off a test installation of Wordpress, that was going to blow the previous version of my own system out of the water. However… the injection of a real-life job and a girlfriend shrunk my spare time considerably, and every time I sat down to work on it I just couldn’t keep up the interest long enough to get anything real done.

So… here we are, Wordpress-ed out and everything. I’ll be playing with this extensively over the next few days or weeks, getting the hang of how everything works together. Eventually I’ll ditch the pre-made theme and write my own theme, but for now… enjoy. There may still be a few kinks to work out. We’ll see how it goes.

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).