figby.com

Since talking to Matt at SXSW, I’ve been considering moving my weblog to WordPress, and today the deed is done. This has taken a couple of weeks to accomplish, mostly because Figby.com was previously running my own homemade software. While rolling my own was a great learning experience, moving to WordPress wil let me focus my programming efforts on my other sites, and focus my attention here on the content.

Modifying the templates and CSS to get the appearance I wanted was easy, although I ended up needing a couple of WordPress plug-ins: EZStatic for the static About, Archives, and Contact Me pages, and Nick’s Recent Posts plugin for the sidebar list of posts. WordPress has a nice plug-in architecture and I had no trouble making minor changes to both of these to fit my needs.

While WordPress includes convenient import scripts for Movable Type and other popular weblog platforms, the price of being a rebel was having to write my own PHP scripts to import the content. This only took about an hour since WP has a logical database scheme. I tested my scripts by converting my wife’s weblog a couple of weeks ago, and they worked fine here too.

One major change: I’ve moved the Quick Links (formerly Quickies) from the sidebar, where nobody noticed them, and mixed them in with the regular posts. This has the unfortunate side-effect of highlighting how many days I post nothing but quick links. I’m hoping I’ll be inspired to post more regular entries from now on to avoid looking silly. The quick links were implemented using code loosely based on a technique posted in the WordPress forums, inspired by Matt‘s original Asides concept.