Fresh from the Oven

New WordPress!

Yes, folks, that’s right, a new version of WordPress was just released earlier today! I being a good webscript follower, decided to upgrade to the newest release to ensure that I don’t get hacked or whatnot (though, I’m sure after that, every goddamn hacker just set their sights on hacking my site). You can get it from the usual places if you do your own blogging.

I did not, however, upgrade to WP 2.8 (the version just released). “Galador, have you gone crazy?” you may be asking, “You just said that you updated your install!” How very observant of you, dear reader! I did in fact update my WordPress, but not to some skanky stable version, heavens no! Instead, I decided to be adventurous and follow the SVN trunk (for you non-techies, the development version, straight from WordPress to me).

And of course, being the dev version, it FUCKED SHIT UP. If you see the layout between now and probably sometime tomorrow when I fix shit, this is not how I want my blog to look, goddammit. If I wanted to change how my blog looks, I’d change the fucking theme! Why do I suddenly have a list of categories and archives on the right side? I don’t want that. Where is my blogroll? And what happened to my meta links. (It’s a good thing I have a separate login button in my theme’s header, else I might [*gasp*] have to type out the admin URL manually! *shudders*)

To be fair, of course, the WordPress doodz do give you a bit of warning that that SVN trunk is probably going to be bork. Ah, the grief of running on the bleeding edge!

UPDATE: It appears I owe a bit of an apology to the WP devs for this post. Seems the only thing that went “wrong” with the update was that somewhere between WP v2.7 and v2.9-rare (I’ll interject here that the WordPress dev versions have hilarious version names), they switched to a much simpler sidebar configuration where you drag and drop (or, if this happened during or prior to 2.7, I guess I never changed the default) “widgets”. Since I didn’t have a widget configuration, it just assumed some defaults. So there you have it, folks! Give these fine people a round of applause for actually making shit easier! *claps*

More Change is a Comin’

I suppose it was inevitable, really. Once I got away from all teh overhead that is Drupal, it was only a short time before I came back to the de-facto blog software out on the internets, Word Press. The reason is simple, really. Textpattern (the software I used for maybe a month) was just too… labyrinthine. To write a post, I had to open two pages, and refresh one of them at least once to get it right. Though, this wasn’t the only reason. I found out that Word Press has a nifty Importer from Textpattern, which made the switch rather tempting.

I did have to do some “hacking” to get it to work. First, I had to start out with an older version of Word Press because the default importer is rather borked. So, I found a blog post detailing how to correctly import the old DB. The reason that I had to have an old version (2.1, to be exact), is because the import mechanism changed between 2.1.x and 2.2.x. So, I got the old version, imported the database, and then installed the newest version and updated the schema. Not too hard.

I picked out a theme (I think it’s pretty sweet), and installed a few plugins, and I’m on my way to making posts and stuff on a new “medium.” Hope you guys enjoy the new stuff. Maybe this will give me a reason to actually update every once in a while now. :P

Brand New Software

If you were trying to access the site roughly 20 minutes prior to this post, you most certainly would have noticed that the site was down for upgrades on the software.

However, this time, it’s not an upgrade on the software, but instead, a complete changeover to a new one. Previously, I was using Drupal, which is certainly a fine software product. The problem that I found with Drupal, however was that for the purpose I was using it for (a personal blog), it was both too encumbering and had too few features specific to a blog (I had to install about 10 modules to the base Drupal install to get it how I wanted it, and how it appeared before I took it down.)

The new software I am using is Textpattern. It’s amazingly light, and I love how it handles styles and presentation. So far, it’s been amazing just setting it up, so I’m ready to do some nitty-gritty writing with this bad puppy. :p

There are a few problems presented with the new software though. If you have any bookmarks from here, they will no longer work. The SEO scheme is different than it was on Drupal. The articles still exist, but the links won’t. You’ll just have to search some. :P Secondly, I didn’t import any of the comments. To do so would have taken a lot of my time, and honestly, most of the comments we’re absolutely critical to enjoy the blog. I did save the comments from the “Epic Band Lulz” post, however, as it had a lot of user input on what Bands / Albums they made. You can find the link in that post.

Other than that, not much’ll change around here. It’ll still look basically the same as before (except for new styles, obviously) and I’ll still make posts, and you guys can still comment. The only difference is the backend, which should hopefully make things a lot easier on me.