Tinkering abounds

· blogging ·

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.

Visually, things should be fairly similar to the previous design, though I have changed the font to Verdana. Because I felt like it. I'll talk about how I went about moving things over later, but there are a couple of new features. One is the aforementioned photoblog, Wings Open Wide. It's very thin on content (I couldn't import my old entries because everything was so broken), but I'll be adding more photographs gradually. The other vaguely new thing is that the media links to recently consumed DVDs, books and CDs in the sidebar now link to a dedicated media page where you can read longer reviews (when I've written them!) and comment on them.

That's about it for now. Some things are bound to have broken (I already know that I'm going to have to sort out the links to uploaded images, and internal permalinks are broken until I sort out some redirects), so let me know if anything is funky.

Update: I'm having a bit of a problem with the RSS 2.0 feed, so I've pointed the old feed URL to the Atom feed. I think that most feed readers can cope with either format these days. Let me know if you have any problem with it updating.