The WordPress install and config: the new blog is very nearly ready to go… so now we have to start digging on things like our massively crufty blogroll: nothing ages faster than blogrolls, unless it’s science fiction writer’s visions of the future. I haven’t touched the blogroll for years, and it is at least 50% out of whack – this will be a good excuse to clean it up. The real issue is how to keep it current (anybody have a blogroll maintenance technology I’ve missed?).
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…
This post shows text wrapped around a 240-px wide photo. You can imagine a longish caption that runs on for a bit, and seeing it adjacent to the photograph. Doesn’t seem to work with this template – the following post moves up under the caption adjacent to the photo.
A 450-pixel wide horizontal image.
Here’s what a 460-pixel-wide horizontal photo looks like. Can post pix up to 500 pixels wide that look OK in Firefox, but breaks the layout in Safari.
So there’s a couple of minor cosmetic changes I want to make (along with figuring out how to author multiple blogs) but the major stuff is done. With MarsEdit hooked up, we have spellchecking available (although there appears to be an AJAX spellchecker for WordPress’ in-browser rich-text editor).
The other trick will be switching over from the old blog to this one. Current theory is too leave the Radio-generated flat html structure in place – it’s already linked from search engines and lots of other blogs and other web pages. WordPress has a feature that would allow me to load the Radio content into MySQL while the URLs would still appear to be the old flat pages. So our archives would be in two places, vs everything in MySQL, which might require a little thought on how to set up and expose to users…
Can it really be this easy to connect MarsEdit to WordPress? Wow. I also see that the photo below breaks the layout in Safari, but not in Firefox…
One of my concerns for this very nice theme (Bla. 1.0 by Steffen Becker) is that it needs to work for text and color and black-and-white photos, which are the main kinds of content I publish. Photos tend to do best with a neutral gray background, while text is most legible if it’s dark on a light background. The buff color of the ‘paper’ background is sufficiently neutral (I hope) to work with most color pix. This particular shot, with its golden hues, should work particularly well. If you look at Steffen’s photo page, you see that it works well for a number of different color and b&w shots…
Progress here at the beta WordPress blog, including localizing the current preferred theme from German to English (gotta love open source). We’ve been wading through config files – nicely presented in WordPress’ admin pages. Hacking Apache, PHP et al. (following the WordPress docs) has gone amazingly well. Kudoes to the WP developers, especially since we’re on a minority platform – Mac OS X – for both client and server. I do note that Firefox exposes more tools than Safari – AJAX apps really do work better when they know what the target platform is – read ‘browser’ not ‘OS.’
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)…