WoodPress

Well, after 6+ years on an ancient and highly customized install of Movable Type 3.15, and 4+ years on various homegrown CMS solutions, I’ve finally upgraded the guts of this site. I chose WordPress. Sure, there are several other excellent options out there to power the blogs of 2010 and beyond, but the familarity of WP, its plugins, pricetag and other factors all fed into the decision. Plus, I told Matt in the halls of SWSW in 2003 that I’d try his little weblog project. I’m finally following through on that.

Exporting thousands of entries isn’t fun. But luckily plenty of folks have done this before. Overall, I’m feeling spolied by the little things that have been commonplace for you folks that are smart about upgrading your blogging engine more often than I. With the Notebook sections ported over, I wanted to launch things and tweak as I have time. That said, there are still parts of the site that still need migrating help (namely, the Work section). Eventually all will be under one roof.

Along with the backend switch, I made a few minor visual tweaks to the site as well (hence the title of this post, “WoodPress”). Nothing terribly exciting. If anything, it’s a slight step backward, to the layouts of SimpleBits’ past. Like anyone who used to blog with frequency pre-2005, I’d like to post here more often — not just to fill up bits and bytes, but to write again. Remember when blogs were more casual and conversational? Before a post’s purpose was to grab search engine clicks or to promise “99 Answers to Your Problem That We’re Telling You You’re Having”. Yeah. I’d like to get back to that here.

Then again, history teaches us that it probably won’t happen. But at least now I can’t blame the software.

Oh, and there’s a new feed now (although the old feed URLs should redirect if my .htaccess is up to snuff).