Welcome to Linkstew point oh. After years of maintaining my own blogging software, it's finally time to let that dream die. Besides reinventing the wheel, I was missing out on newfangled blog features like trackbacks, multiple feed formats, and posting APIs.
When I started online journaling way back in high school, it was just some static html. This grew into a series server side includes, which later became some php templates. There was a moment when I realized "hey, this is one of those 'buhlog' things... I should see what tools other people are using." So I checked out some site called "blogger" I'd been hearing about, but at that point blogger was only a few months old, and I was already doing things blogger couldn't (and it turns out wouldn't do for years to come) like categories. Later I evaluated Greymatter (remember that thing?) and later still I evaluated Moveable Type, but each time there was something I didn't like.
So I went through a few big code iterations, and learned how to do a lot of things the hard way, and did some neat stuff, and it was probably a good learning exercise. But, Linkstew's code has long been neglected, and I was never going to get around to doing everything I wanted to the site. Heck, I figured that out with In Passing years ago.
So without giving it too much thought, I decided to switch to WordPress. I've had a basic migration of Linkstew in WordPress sitting around for a few months, and yeah, there were things I didn't like about it, but last night I decided to just bite the bullet and get it over with. My primary interfaces to Linkstew were highly polished to suit my taste over the course of years, so it's unreasonable to expect that a tool like WordPress is going to be exactly what I was hoping for. Just because "I don't like the category management interface" and "I don't like PHP" is no reason to miss out on everything that a community supported open source software package has to offer.
Besides, maybe I can write a plugin to do more tag-like category management and share it for everyone's benefit.
There are almost certainly broken bits. If you notice anything, let me know. Here's a list of what I know is wrong:
- The picture blog was last in the migration. I'm going to investigate ways to avoid reinventing this wheel before I add it back.
The rss feed and the /noid/ links should still work, but I couldn't get mod_rewrite to work for those URLs, and instead I made some small 301 redirect scripts to handle each case.- I fixed mod_rewrite so these now return 200s, but later I plan to switch them back to being 301s.- The current layout is transitional. I don't intend to recreate the old design, but I have ideas for what I want to do that I didn't want to hold up the migration for.
Links to categories with spaces would appear to be broken.- There's something wrong with quotes in the RSS feed.
hehe…yeah, I’m ready to go to Wordpress as well, especially since Dreamhost has a one-click install for it! :-)
It’s funny that you’re switching to an established publishing system, because recently i feel as though the technology is getting so ubiquitous that to do anything truly unique you can just as easily code your own to get unprecedented results. Does that make any sense? Now that there are more options, i’m more motivated to code my own. Maybe just because the amount of frustration at not getting what i want out of the many different CMS that are out now is much more frustrating then not getting what i want just from Blogger, Greymatter, and LJ back in the day.
Anyhow, I hope this switch means you’re happy and will be posting more often, but I hope you don’t trash the old system entirely – i always thought it was pretty damn nifty for something that was homegrown.
Peter: I’m pretty sure I’m happy to let that old code die a quick death; It’s a lot worse than you can imagine.
The only feature I can think of that was all that hot was the “related entries,” and there’s a WordPress plugin to do that already. I have it installed, and if you look at an entry page, some entries show “related entries” after the entry. It does need some tweaking, though (currently I believe it’s only doing similarity based on entry title).
What other old linkstew features are you thinking of?
Moving over to an established solution such as WordPress has been something I’ve been considering for years. I’m still thinking it over because I kind of like possessing the control over everything. The control comes at a cost though, and I’ve never truly found time to devote to all the things I’d like to add, and instead, I have had to endure with a system in a transitional and unstable state for as long as I can remember. Perhaps the only reason I continue to balk at using such systems is because using my own code allows me to pretend I actually know something about computers. It might be time to take the plunge.