Yes, I've managed to import the old posts from my blog! It was pretty easy to do, complicated only by the fact that I initially accidentally pulled the data from a different, older WordPress blog that I deleted some years ago but apparently still had the MySQL databases for.
At any rate, all my posts are now once again accessible, and any old links to them should still work. Comments have not yet been imported, but that's the next step. For now everything should be working as expected, but please let me know if you encounter any errors or problems.
As you may recall, I've mentioned a fair number of times in the past that I've been planning to migrate my blog away from WordPress on onto my own custom Django-based solution. Part of the reason for wanting to do this is fun, but also because I'd like to be able to have a little more integration between my blog and my business site.
If you're reading this, you can no doubt tell that something isn't quite right with my blog. Mainly, it looks completely different, this may well be the only post you can see, and it might be lacking a feature or two that it had before. The reason for this is that my hand has been forced. For the past several weeks I've been unable to log into my blog. No, I didn't forget my password, it just won't let me log in (it even says I have the wrong password when I try something else). This simply will not stand.
So I've thrown together a very very quick and barebones blogging app (and when I mean quick, I mean I did this in less than two hours) that at least gives me some ability to keep blogging. I will, of course, be expanding it to add the missing functionality, and I will be working on importing the posts, comments, and such from the old blog (I still have access to the databases, so this shouldn't be a problem). In the mean time I'm planning to set up some redirects so that links to old posts aren't broken.
Hopefully it won't take very long for me to get this new blog up to speed in terms of functionality and design, and to get my old stuff imported into it so I can finally be rid of WordPress entirely. Of course, I do have to prioritize projects for clients, so it may take a bit longer than I'd like.
I've just started working on a new project using ExpressionEngine, a PHP-based content management system. I didn't really know a whole lot about it going in (it was the client's choice to use EE), but from what I've seen so far it's a pretty decent piece of software.
Being a CMS, it sits somewhere between blogging software like WordPress, and a framework like Django. Basically this means that it's much more structured than Django, proving a lot more blogging and related functionality out of the box but still much more flexible than WordPress allowing for a lot more freedom in the creation of your website. So far it seems like they've struck a good balance, providing a relatively shallow learning curve while still giving you a lot of powerful features.
Of course, for me, I found the more structured nature of it to be a bit restrictive. Also, I just don't get some of the choices they made. For example, your URLs, while readable and search engine friendly, all look like 'domain.tld/index.php/blog/archive/&c;'. Not a bad URL, but why on Earth is that 'index.php' in there? If they're going to use URL re-writing to provide nice URLs, why do they leave that useless bit of information in there? It's not like it would have been any harder for them to have taken it out. Also, the only obvious way to edit templates is through their web-based control panel. I'm sure there's really nothing stopping me from going in with an FTP client or via SSH and editing the text files directly, but they don't even hint at where you would want to look to do that (and as I didn't install it on the server myself I have no experience with the directly structure). Neither of these problems is a big deal, or a big obstacle to someone who knows what they're doing and wants to change it, but they just seem like very strange design decisions to me.
Overall, however, I think it looks like a pretty good system, and very good way to rapidly build a flexible and highly useful CMS. I don't know that it'll ever be my first choice for a project, as anything I can do with EE I can also do with Django, and in a way that's more intuitive (though probably has a higher initial investment of time), and anything that I don't need that level of flexibility and power for, I'd probably just use WordPress. But still, it's a nice piece of software, and I can definitely see how it would be a very good choice for a lot of people.
If you didn't already know, WordPress has released an (free) iPhone app. I'm writing this post from it.
So far it seems pretty cool. All the basic functionality is there, plus a few really cool features like live previews that work exactly as they do when you're editing online, and, even better, the ability to add pictures either from your iPhone's library or directly from the camera. I'll test that out now:
Ah, apparently the picture(s) will simply be attached to the bottom of the post. Makes sense. If you're wondering, that's Dexter, our crosseyed kitten, named after the eponymous serial killer hero of the amazingly awesome Showtime show of the same name (which is based on the novel(s) by Jeff Lindsay which are, sadly, not nearly as good as the show).
The iPhone's auto-correcting type is very useful here. Sadly, it's not all that great for manually entering HTML, which is how I prefer to do things (and, as far as I can tell, the only way to do things with the iPhone app).
Anyway, the app is, in my opinion, pretty great. Anyone with a WordPress blog and an iPhone should get it.
As I mentioned in my last post, I recently migraded my dy/dx tech website to a different hosting company. If you've really been paying attention, you may recall that not too long ago I had gotten a Media Temple hosting account with the plans on migrating all of the sites I host, both my own and clients' to it only to discover that setting up Django on a Media Temple (dv) account is far more trouble than it's worth. My estimation of that hasn't changed, in fact I actually cancelled my Media Temple account a few weeks ago after the last client I had hosted there was moved off to another host. My experiences with WebFaction have been so positive (exploding data centers notwithstanding), that I have instead migrated everything to their servers. Well, not everything yet. This blog is still hosted on DreamHost for the time being (though I plan on moving it to a WebFaction hosted WordPress blog in the very near future before eventually migrating it to a Django based solution as I've mentioned before).
The hosting hassles referred to in the title, thankfully, have nothing to do with the actual hosting companies I'm dealing with, and are instead due to a foolish mistake on my part: when I switched my domain to WebFaction, I forgot that I had custom MX records enabling the use of my hosted google apps for my domain. As a result, as the new DNS information started propagating, people stopped being able to send me email. Fortunatly, it was an easy fix to just change the MX records with WebFaction, and I don't think I missed any important emails, but if anyone out there got a bounceback when sending me an email, that's why.
It's been a while since I've been able to announce a big new project. Not because I haven't had any, but because everything I've been working on lately has been so large that nothing is quite ready to go live yet. But finally, I get to announce a big project that I recently finished: the Becoming MOBOS video blog. As I'm sure many of you from the Boston area are aware, there is a new Mandarin Oriental that's been under construction down by the Pru. They hired me to create an internal video blog for them. Unfortunately, since it's internal, I can't link to it, but the screenshot to the right links to a full-size, albeit redacted, image. It's a WordPress based blog using a verstion of WPelements.com's MassiveNews theme customized by your truly. I also used FlowPlayer to provide the Flash video playback capabilities. All in all, I think it turned out to be a pretty slick site.
That's not the only news, however. In preparation for announcing the Becoming MOBOS site I've been doing a little work sprucing up my own website. So I also get to announce a new version of the dy/dx tech website (I also changed hosts for it, so you may need to wait for the DNS to propagate if you're still seeing the old site). The overall look of the site is the same as before, but I've removed some rather pointless elements such as the Google Map that used to be on the front page. In it's place is now a slideshow of screenshots from my portfolio, which I think is a much better use of the space. The majority of the changes, however, are under the hood. As you may recall, I redeveloped the site using Django a while ago. Since then I've spent a lot more time with Django and know a lot more about it, so I completely redeveloped the site (using the newforms-admin branch and was able to make a lot of improvements to the code, and basically leave it better positioned to integrate more features in the future. Among other things, I plan on migrating this blog to a Django-based solution and integrating it into the dy/dx tech website to some extent. I've been working heavily with Django for the past several months, and I just keep liking it more and more. It makes every part of my job so much more enjoyable and, in a lot of cases, faster. Be on the lookout for another project going live in the next couple weeks: this one will be Django-based and will be very public, and, I predict, very popular.
