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If any of you visited earlier, you will have noticed either an “under re-construction” page, or a big ‘ole mess. I’ve been tinkering again (not that this will be much of a surprise to anyone). I used to run this weblog using WordPress, which I still think is a very fine bit of software. However, a couple of things made me think that it might be worth a bit of work to port this blog over to ExpressionEngine.

The first was that I built my Tracks site using ExpressionEngine (hereafter, EE), and was very impressed with how powerful but easy to use it was. Then Leslie Camacho of pMachine very generously donated a couple of Personal Licences for EE to me for the Tracks site and my own. This allows you to use the Photo Gallery module, which isn’t available in the free Core version. As some of you may know, my photoblog has been very broken for a while, so it seemed like a great opportunity to rebuild that using the Gallery module.

The second thing was that it would be quite a bit easier organisation-wise to administer all of my sites through one administrative interface. I’m doing things in stages, so Tracks is still running from a separate installation, but I’m quietly confident that I’ll be able to merge the two. That brings other advantages, like being able to share information between the sites. For example, I currently have to remember to update the link to the latest version of Tracks in the sidebar manually, but when I merge the installations I’ll be able pull the information in automatically.

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OK, I think I’m finally there; WordPress 1.5 is properly installed. It was a bit more tricky and nerve-wracking than I’d hoped, but I think that’s probably because I’d done quite a bit of hacking of my index.php and comments.php, so I had to merge the old files with the new changes. However, the new structure for templates should make it much easier to upgrade in future.

It didn’t help that I had a corrupted download of the files, permissions problems when I uploaded and conflicts in my .htaccess file. Oh, and a conflict with one of the plugins (HashCash), which is why I made all those cryptic and pointless comments on the previous entry. Anyway, WP 1.5 is a really nice upgrade (and fully justifies the 1.2 -> 1.5 leap). The changes to the admin interface are really smart and make it much easier to manage posts, comments and plugins. As usual, if you do find any lurking problems that I haven’t spotted, let me know.

WordPress has been updated to 1.2.1:

I am relieved to announce that WordPress 1.2.1 is now available for download. This release addresses a few bugs and minor security issues with 1.2. We’ve also backported the new login system from 1.3 that is much friendlier and should address many of the problems people have had with logging in and cookies.

I’ve upgraded, and all seems to be well. However, there’s bound to be something I’ve forgotten, so do let me know if you notice anything out of the ordinary.

WordPress 1.2 final release is out, and I’ve installed it without problems. While I was at it, I also installed the updated statistics plugin, written originally by GamerZ and ported to plugin format by Ryan. You can get a whole page of interesting statistics here, or use the link right at the bottom of the sidebar on the right. Among other fascinating facts, you can see who tops the league of frequent commenters (like the League of Gentlemen, only… not.). It all seems to be working fine, but let me know if you spot anything amiss.

I’m fed up to the back teeth with comment spammers, so I decided to do something about it. I do use the wpblacklist plugin, and that’s a great help, but you still miss one or two items when a new spammer appears and you haven’t updated your list. The majority of spam comments are made on old entries, so I decided to set up automatic closing of comments, as described here. I’ve set it to close comments after 14 days—that seems about right to me, but if anyone wants me to extend it a bit, just let me know. I’ve put a line in my cron file to run the script every day like this:

GET http://pathtoscript/auto-close.php > /dev/null 2<&1

It goes without saying that anybody (except spammers!) who wants to make a comment on a closed entry only has to email me, and I’ll put the comment in myself.

You might notice that some of the comments in the list below each post now have white backgrounds, and others have grey backgrounds. There’s a story behind this. I wanted to have a fancy alternating colour scheme for the comments, so that they would have alternating white and grey backgrounds¹. Fine, I thought—this should be easy. Each comment has a comment ID number, so if I write a function to check whether the ID is even or odd, I can set the class attribute of the li element to ‘even’ or ‘odd’ appropriately. Sorted.

Or not. I had forgotten that the comment IDs are assigned as each comment is made over the whole site, so that the numbers on the comments on each post are not necessarily consecutive. So instead of a nice orderly alternation, I have a distressing degree of randomness. I’m sure that there must be a way to do this properly, using the content() attribute of lists, but I can’t think how. Does anyone know how, or can you point me to a helpful tutorial on the subject?

¹ In the memorable words of Pete, the yellow was a bit jingly.

I’ve just upgraded to WordPress 1.2 beta—-a wonderfully easy and trouble-free process. I think it speaks volumes for the quality of the coding in WordPress that I’ve been using an alpha version since I switched, without any significant problems. The beta has been tidied up a great deal, and if you currently have 1.0.x installed, you’ll find a lot of nice new features. For me, the big improvements are the customisable meta-data you can attach to each post (this is how the EXIF data is stored in Pictorialis, which I use for my photoblog), and the Plugin architecture. You used to have to manually paste the code for hacks into a my-hacks.php file. It wasn’t particularly difficult, but perhaps a bit off-putting for beginners. Now the same functionality can be provided by plugins which are just dropped into a directory. They then appear on the Plugins page of the admin interface, where you can enable and disable them with a single click.

I promised—-when I wrote about my reasons for switching—-that I would list the hacks I had used on my site. Now seems as good a time as any to do that.

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Having updated this blog to WordPress, I’m now turning my attention to my photoblog—wings open wide. I found a fantastic customisation of the standard WordPress install produced by Mark, called Pictorialis. It has all the great features of WordPress, plus easy image uploads, and automatic resizing and thumbnailing of images. I’ve tinkered with the stylesheet a bit, and imported my posts from Movabletype.

One slight pain is that I have to wrap the main images in some

and

tags to get them to work properly with the template, so some of the older images currently look a bit weird. I’m gradually fixing them, along with making a few more minor changes to the CSS and to the format of the archives, so that you can browse by category. I’m quite pleased with the way it’s shaping up so far—have a sneaky peek if you want.

Once I’m happy with how it’s working, I’ll redirect the old URIs to the new entries, as I did with this site.

I thought that I’d post some brief comments about the new design of this site (later, I’ll post about the WordPress Hacks I’ve used). As much as anything, it will serve as a reminder to myself when I forget how the heck I did something. I also found that when I saw something I liked on another site, I missed an explanation of how it was done. I plan to link to this post on the About page, so that anyone who gets the same feeling coming here will have some answers.

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I said earlier that I would write about why I’ve made the move from Movabletype to WordPress. I want to say right at the start that my decision really isn’t a criticism of Movabletype. It has served me extremely well for more than a year, and has made my life immeasurably easier. But one thing I’ve found as I’ve been keeping this blog is that your needs (and skills) change as time goes on, so that you can’t necessarily forsee what you will need in a blogging tool a year or two years down the line. The thing that prompted my itchy feet in the end was the problem of rebuilding the site.

Movabletype (MT) and WordPress (WP) have a lot of similarities (indeed, many of the new features I’ve included in my new design could have been accomplished with MT), but one fundamental difference: MT produces static web pages, and WP produces dynamic ones. This difference is an important one; every time the content of the page needs to change in a static system (which can happen quite frequently with a weblog with comments, trackbacks and so on), the entire page needs to be rebuilt. If you have monthly and category archives, those pages need to be rebuilt too. Rebuilding is pretty speedy when you have a small number of posts, but it gets slower as time goes on and you accumulate more content. However, with a dynamic system, the changes are made the instant someone reloads the page.

I tried a number of different blogging tools, but eventually settled on WP after setting up a test blog and playing with it for a while. It’s a great system—extremely easy to install and configure, and yet with a lot of scope for advanced customization. Better yet, it’s Open Source, so anyone can contribute hacks and fixes for it. It’s also free as in beer. Not that I begrudge paying for software, especially something that I depend on every day. I donated to MT when I started using it, and I consider that money very well spent.

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I’ve finished the bulk of the tinkering now, so you should see a shiny new PHP-based design, powered by WordPress. I’ll write more later on why I made the move from Movabletype, but for now I’m a bit exhausted. I’ve added redirects from the main index page of the old blog, as well as redirects for the individual archive pages, so with any luck, permalinks shouldn’t break. Your mileage may vary…

Some of the older entries look odd because I wrote them using Textile, so I’ll gradually clean them up. Let me know what you think. Oh, and don’t forget to update your RSS newsreader with the new feed addresses (see the bottom of the sidebar to the right).