Another issue is categories: the old ones suck... don't really seem to help readers figure out what to read or subscribe to (except 'photos'). The new ones on the beta as we write are: All, Photos, Politics, Taking Faith, Technology and Webloging - subject to review (reader input most welcome).

We also need to figure out how to make the RSS feed continue seamlessly, and move the blog home page to our root directory (which, fortunately looks relatively straightforward). Then there's the issue of the archives: we can move the old Radio posts to WordPress (the beauty of an old and new database-driven blog) where they inherit the new look and feel, or leave the old posts, already widely linked from blogs and indexed by search engines, as they are on the file system and figure out an archive directory to get people to the right place. The last issue is managing the cutover in a way that's easy for readers...
Comments 10:01:29 PM    

Most of the low level stuff is now in place: next steps are upstream. I want to wire in MarsEdit, for one thing. I also need to figure out how to migrate the last ten years' posts et al. and do the right thing as far as RSS feeds go. I'm thinking we'll just leave Radio's flat HTML files in place. They could be migrated to WordPress: I need to understand better the user experience if I leave the extant pages - already widely indexed - in situ vs. moving them into MySQL and putting redirect mechanisms in place.

WordPress' MySQL pages load very quickly: I've always been a fan of HTML served from the file system because it was relatively easy to understand and manage, and http server + cgi + database have, in the past, offered a fairly miserable user experience vs. flat html, especially for us publishers with less-than-enterprise-class hardware and bandwidth.

That has changed, it would seem: serving directly from a database is very different from the Radio experience. Radio could, under Mac OS 9 (and below), when it was known as Frontier (and, later Manilla), serve pages directly from its database, rendering HTML on the fly (and it was way ahead of its time). You could change the whole look and feel of the site just by changing the template, and all the old posts picked up the changes. But performance issues made rendering to flat html the preferred path.

WordPess, running on a last-generation G4 is very fast: Radio is no longer being actively developed. Radio/Manilla/Frontier, alas, weren't winning technologies (full disclosure: I had minor involvement with Userland, the parent of Frontier)...
Comments 12:03:53 AM