Rants, Raves, and Ramblings

…because I absolutely despise the word “blog”.

You may have noticed the new look and feel of the journal. That’s because I have officially caved and switched over to using WordPress. I know, I know…this is backpedaling somewhat on my initial grandstanding over coding my own journal. But I feel I made the right decision in converting, and here’s the big reason why: I wasn’t getting as much posted as I wanted to on the old journal.

As stated in my previous posts, I actually do have a lot of entries I’ve wanted to make – some for well over a year. But I found myself not really having the time or energy to flesh them out – at least, not a satisfactory degree.

My hand-coded stuff was a pain in the ass to work with; everything had to be done in raw HTML, including line breaks and text formatting, and editing entries or comments after the fact required going in to phpMyAdmin to manually tinker with the data. I didn’t have an easy way to store drafts or proofread, and the aesthetics, frankly, looked dated.

These are all things I could have fixed – believe me! – but just didn’t have the time to sit down and mudge together. I barely had time to type out the entries I wanted to post, much less go through and fix up a bunch of code. And hey, I didn’t make this journal as an experiment in php (well, not as a primary reason, anyway) – I did it to 1) archive my ever-so-humble insights and observations, and 2) to keep in touch with friends, acquaintances, and former students. The real mission of the journal was suffering, and that was unacceptable.

So, I got a commercial blogging engine.

But why WordPress? I’m glad you asked.

When shopping around for a new back-end, I decided to look at what some of the blogs I read regularly use: William Bennett uses Blogspot, Bruce Schneier uses Movable Type, Wil Wheaton uses TypePad, and John Scalzi uses WordPress. That narrowed my options down to four simple choices. In the end, I found Blogspot to be too obviously templated and blase, while Movable Type failed to excite me in any way. TypePad seemed very viable, but I was kind of turned off by how heavily it touts integration with social networking crap like Twitter and Facebook. WordPress won the trial.

And I have to say, I really like WordPress so far. My biggest complaint with them a few years ago was how every WordPress site looks the same; I’m happy to report that they have done a great job at providing a good selection of layouts. Everything else is pretty solid; there’s no annoying ads, a very easy to use dashboard for managing the blog, plenty of bells and whistles, highly configurable…I’ve had plenty to play with over the last weekend.

The most time-consuming parts were tweaking the layout and moving the old posts and comments over. It was kind of interesting to get some numbers for the last 2.5 years worth of blogging (32 posts and 125 comments, for an average of 3.9 comments oer post). I also like that my little text editor includes a word count (currently up to 533 for this post); it’s made me curious what the average word count is on all my posts combined. Haven’t found that feature yet, though.

All in all, I hope this move doesn’t shock or repulse anybody who loved the old setup. The end result should be more posts more often, which is how I originally intended it to be, and which I hope you look for as well. I would like to hear what everyone thinks of the change, especially the layout. For example, I know I’m kind of iffy about the calendar feature over there on the sidebar. I need some outside opinions to help me decide what to do.

What do YOU think about it? Like it? Hate it? Like some parts but hate others?