Wordpress

So far, Wordpress seriously rocks. I’ve found close to a dozen skins, added the blogroll from my old blog, found a nice backup/restore utility, and added a comment SPAM stopper. Performance on my side is a little slow at times, unfortunately the web server I’m on seems overloaded at times - the load average was 26 a few hours ago!

I was a little leery of using a database-driven web site, since I haven’t managed databases in years. I liked the fact that Blogger stores all of my journal entries as HTML files on my servers, and Blosxom, with it’s file-system based storage was in the running for a while.

I decided to try importing my Livejournal entries into Wordpress. Livejournal, despite being very democratic and not seemingly market-driven has always only allowed monthly backups. I’m sure this is more a holdover from their pre-acquisition days, trying to conserve hardware, and not a marketing retention gimmick. I backed up my WP database, ran a LJ export tool, imported my LJ entries into WP, then thought twice about it (wanted to evaluate whether I wanted my “friends-only” entries on the internet) and so restored from the previous backup. Seamlessly.

As it always goes with any upgrade, I was tempted to change a couple of things at once. I got the photo gallery looking consistent with the skin I’m using on the blog, and then decided to upgrade to the newest Gallery. For some reason, my style changes didn’t take, I had to upgrade NetPBM, and re-do all of my thumbnails, but it’s working now.

Next in line will be CSS-ifying my static pages, or bringing them into Wordpress as journal entries. I’d prefer the latter, using Wordpress as a real content management system for all of the text on my system. I’ve got a couple of links with some serious linkage going on out there, so I gotta figure out if I can use some sort of custom permalinks to link to individual entries.