The big move to WordPress

Posted on by Ian C.

Yes, after my recent success with GPMINI, I’ve now dragged GBMINI over to WordPress …
#1 Using WordPress sometimes and MovableType sometimes is very confusing;
#2 I get hundreds of spam comments each day – most don’t make it to the weblog but I still have to sift / delete them!

I’m hoping that the WordPress spam filtering will do better than MovableType – if nothing else, the move should confuse the spammers for a couple of days 😉

Anyway, moving GBMINI is a much bigger challenge than GPMINI was, and I’m not yet complete.

One major problem is that the archive URLs are not full length (for example /mtblog/archive/2006/10/minisontop_on_w.shtml) while WordPress links are full length and without the extension (/2006/10/minisontop_on_wordpress/) … for now I’ve used a giant 100K .htaccess file to redirect every post! There’s probably a better way.
When I set up GPMINI earlier this year, I used MovableType but because I was considering WordPress, I set MovableType up to use full length URLs, so that wasn’t an issue with the previous move.

Another thing is that, unlike GPMINI, I have lots of “extra” pages on GBMINI (the MINI sales figures, auto-up windows, etc) – these pages are all half broken at the moment, till I get to fixing them …

So, some stuff will be broken for a little while – sorry! But mostly things should be OK; please tell me if not …

UPDATE:
Well I was wrong about the spammers … Akismet has already caught 15 … sorry, 17 … spam comments, and I’ve only had the new site running for about half an hour! Apparently the spammer engines are pretty smart and able to handle different weblog comment engines on the fly 😦

Web Hosting: credit where credit is due

Posted on by Ian C.

I know this might be tempting fate, but …

After my extreme upset with Site5 a while ago, I’m pleased to say that since that awful period of unreliability & excessive downtime, my hosting with Site5 has been trouble free.

I notice that Site5 have removed a few features – they apparently no longer offer guaranteed uptime, and a host status page they used to have for each host machine is no longer accessible.
There are some new features offered instead which might interest some people – their latest special offer on hosting is impressive ($5/month for 55GB storage! Pre-paid for two years though)

So, Site5: Well Done! But please keep the service as good as it is now, and not like it was for a while!

MINIsOnTop on WordPress

Posted on by Ian C.

I”ve spent some amount of time this last week experimenting with WordPress, achieving my goal of moving the MINIsOnTop site over:

Why? Well …
In the past, one person has been in charge of updating MINIsOnTop; unfortunately that person is sometimes busy with “real life”! By moving over to WordPress, we can have it set up so that a number of “authors” can post to the site – this will spread the load and should make for quicker updates.

I’m reasonably impressed by WordPress so far, compared to MovableType which I use for GBMINI & GPMINI.
When I started with weblogs, I used Blogger because it was very easy to get started. After reaching limits, I switched to MovableType which was a great choice.
Now though, WordPress is probably better than MovableType – primarily because of the huge amount of users supporting it with adaptions and extensions. There’s also a couple of features I particularly like that are available in WordPress but not MovableType:
– the ability to have “pages” as well as posts;
– the ability to “click back in time”.

“Pages” are any page that isn’t a time-related weblog entry, but you want it to look like the rest of your site. In MovableType, I use a “server side include” to fill in the right hand banner, so I get my “pages” to look similar to the weblog, but with WordPress it’s automatic and not just similar but the same.

With my weblogs, you can see the recent posts on the main page, you can click one of the “recent entries” links, or you can click “all entries”. With WordPress, there is an “earlier posts” or “next page” type of link available, which takes you “back in time” page by page through the posts. This feature works particularly well on weblogs with lots of regular updates, like Motoringfile (which is also running on WordPress).

There’s some stuff I’d still like to improve on the new MINIsOnTop – in particular it would be nice to integrate the Gallery – but it’s running so that’s good enough for now.
Will I change GBMINI & GPMINI? I don’t know – there’s no particular reason to change since everything works quite well; it would be nice to have that “earlier posts” feature though, and it looks like WordPress might be better for fighting spam comments these days …

(and thanks to DB for encouragement!)