The Move to WordPress
Yes that’s right kids. If you are reading this you are on the new WordPress powered blog of Clickable Bliss. While I do lose some geek pride in dumping my own home grown Rails blog engine for WordPress I am gaining some sanity. Why the move?
- Comment spam was getting out of control, even with my math question. WordPress doesn’t solve this totally but I’ve been very satisfied with Akismet filtering on my personal blog.
- I wanted to use MarsEdit to post.
- I wanted to start proper pinging of content servers when I post.
- Rails is overkill for such a simple blog, and I’d rather use those servers / my attention for bigger applications.
- Generally speaking I’m hoping to use public plugins and not have to write and maintain all of the code myself.
As far as the feature set goes I’ve tried to stay true to the simple design I had before, thus most of this WordPress install was taking features out. No categories, tags or trackbacks. The page layouts have been gutted to show only the basics. There is however still a comment preview (though not live), a subscribe to new comments via email or RSS(new), as well as Markdown support. I’ll tip my hat to Daniel and Rogue Amoeba for the “About the author/Try my software” sidebar pattern.
During the move I took the opportunity to fix some since-gone-missing images in the older posts as well as fix a few character encoding issues. The old site should be redirecting everything over here. All of the old permalinks as well as date indexes. For the new URLs I’m using the WordPress native dashes to break words in the title. I used to use underscores but I couldn’t get the underscore pluging to work (hopefully a sign of things NOT to come) and then found out Google might like dashes better anyways, so I stuck with them. The only thing I think I lost in the move was email subscriptions to new comments of old posts. I doubt it’s a huge deal, but it didn’t seem to have a huge ROI as far as my time goes (very complicated, little reward).
The design as I said is pretty close to the old site. The most notable change is probably the logo. When I first commissioned the logo I remember one rule was the logo had to scale. No color, full color, inverse color. I’ve played around with the logo on black before but this is the first time its made it out to the public. I think it’s very slick looking on black. The rest of the Clickable Bliss site hasn’t changed but I’ll probably do a shake up eventually. Not sure how it’ll go. For me this logo on black is almost an experiment.
Anyways let me know if you see something broken. Pardon the construction. Yatta yatta.
Posted on: May 19, 2007 – 1:43 am
11 Comments
This is a test of comments and Markdown. Will preview work too? Hurray!
Clean blog! Bug: my blog is not listed :) You know what? I’m a TextMate svn comitter :)
Check out this grammar tip’s 2 a. Comma is useful for readers.
I really like the new “look”. I can tell a difference compared to the old blog and this new one. Very nice. Now you can spend more time writing those awesome apps!
Looks great, and hope you continue to enjoy WordPress! Can I get a link? </shameless>
Looks nice! I agree the logo looks quite spiffy.
I like the fact that the central content area is not fixed-width as on many sites, but resizes with the window. I’m just getting started with WordPress myself, on a non-Cocoa blog, and will try to do the same when I get a chance.
May I ask what plugins you are using to support comment preview, comment RSS, and Markdown in comments? Also, there is a “Safe HTML” plugin I have been looking into, based on this — have you tried that at all?
I know you want to avoid clutter and complexity, but there are a couple of small additions I would prefer to see:
Testing — my comment from a minute ago hasn’t shown up yet, and I’m wondering if it just takes a while, or if it’s because I didn’t supply an email address…
@justin and @takaaki: Your blogs have been added.
@rodger: Thanks for the kind words.
I thought I posted a comment yesterday, but it didn’t show up. Trying again…
I like the new look and agree the logo looks spiffy.
What plugin are you using for comment previews?
Great, that worked.
I know you want to minimize complexity, but I’d like to suggest two small additions:
@Andy Lee: Your original comments got nabbed by Akismet. Yikes! Guess I need to keep an eye on it.
The date is shown, though not with the title, it’s at the end of the post. Nothing is required for a comment so no need to “required” marks. I’ll see if I can add a line about how the email is just for me. I’m using Filosofo Comments Preview, Markdown, SmartyPants and Subscribe To Comments. The key for the preview for me is that it touch the server and thus get parsed by Markdown. Lots of others use JavaScript and don’t do Markdown.
Thanks, Mike! I’m using the same Markdown and Subscribe To Comments plugins — I didn’t think Markdown applied to comments as well as posts, but I see now it does.
I had tried the Filosofo plugin and the previews looked weird for some reason; maybe some other tweak I did is confusing it. I’ll experiment more now that I see it works well for you.
Regarding the date and time — I meant I’d like to see it on individual comments, not just the post as a whole. I like to get an idea of the history of the thread. But that’s just me.
Thanks again!
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