Hello again! If you’re visiting this page, then you may be wondering “what the hell happened to this place?”

I was sitting down, working on the website code when all of a sudden, I realised that I really, really didn’t want to be doing this any more. “What,” I wonderered to myself, “is the point of having a blog if nothing gets done but fiddling with the code for hours upon end?” So I set out looking for well-established blogging packages that would allow for the maximum amount of customization, as well as being relatively easy to set up and use on a daily basis. Eventually, I settled upon WordPress.

As an initial package, WordPress isn’t mind-blowingly amazing. It’s very slick, but the feature set isn’t particularly wonderful. Then I looked at the WordPress Codex, and immediately found a plethora of different plugins, extensions and all sorts of other lovelyness. I even coded a couple of little extensions myself for the fun of it, as I wasn’t entirely satisfied with LatexRender for my mathematics posts. I’m also using the Super Archives plugin for the live archives (they still need quite a bit of work). The amount of customization one can achieve is really quite staggering.

Importing the posts was actually relatively trivial. Of course, I have (or rather had) two separate sources for my blog posts; Warwick Blogs and my own backend. Warwick Blogs allows export via Movable Type. I did run into a problem with some stray tabs messing around the import engine, but after that all was good. I knocked up an exporter for my news entries and after an hour of fiddling the content was in place.

The theme I’m using has obviously been re-styled. I’m still not totally happy with it, but for the time being I simply can’t be bothered messing around with it any more. It’s based off of the original Kubric theme which comes with WordPress 2. It took a little while to get used to because of the different files used for the theme, but I think that it’s turned out okay.

There’s still a lot of work to do. As you can see, the majority of my posts are still un-tagged. So there’s the matter of leafing through all of those - something I’m not particularly looking forward to. Besides this, I also want to get working on some kind of photographic blogging thing (no, I’m not sure what that means either) and that means I have the joy of organising my photos!

7:19 pm | Posted in Computing, Photography, Web Development