kelvinluck.com

a stroke of luck

Now running on wordpress

I’ve finally got around to updating my website and it is now running on the latest, greatest version of WordPress. After many years of fighting against Textpattern and never updating the blog because it was such a hassle I’ve come kicking and screaming into the 21st century. And I have to say I’m pretty pleased so far with WordPress… It was pretty easy to import my database from the the old Textpattern install and then it was just a case of going through and making sure all of my content wasn’t relying on any plugins I had installed in Textpattern.

For a theme, I started from Daydreams 2 by J but I found that there were lots of bits and pieces I wanted to change so I forked it into my own theme that I could add what I liked to it (including the random headers and Shadowbox support for displaying embedded flash) and fix a few bugs to make the generated HTML validate.

I also installed a few plugins straight away:
  • Textile2 helped by formatting all of my old posts imported from Textpattern (I first tried TextileWrapper but had issues with it adding extra P tags).
  • GeshiWrapper did likewise for sourcecode examples.
  • WordPress.com Stats should let me know a little more about my visitors.
  • Last.Fm Records lets me put my most recent popular album covers in the sidebar.
  • Contact Form 7 does my contact page.
  • Delicious for wordpress lets me put my latest links from delicious in the sidebar.
  • All in One SEO Pack might just help improve my search engine rankings.
  • Akismet should hopefully stop the comment spam and maybe I won’t need to moderate all my comments any more.
  • 404-notifier should show me any URLs that I broke when I did the move.
  • Live Comment Preview is a little bit of javascript niceness for when people are leaving comments.
We’ll see as everthing settles into place if they all behave as expected and if I discover I want or need anything else…

Because everything probably didn’t transfer correctly from the old site I have left it available at this URL (2005 was the year I started that blog):

http://2005.kelvinluck.com/

I’m still fiddling around with the theme (I’m not really happy with the headers at the moment) and the feeds to try and get everything working just so but hopefully the site is all functional and I will now be able to easily create new content so hopefully I’ll start doing it a bit more frequently…

And sorry to anyone who was subscribed to my RSS… I fear I may have spammed you all with my old content as part of this move.

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