New WordPress Blog

As you can see the new WordPress blog is up and running. There are still some work I have to do, but so far it looks good.

I ran into a few problems getting WordPress switched over. Initially, I was prepping WordPress on a virtual server and once I was finished with it I would just move the VM over to my main machine. But the problem started out with hardware problems. It was having problems running Windows 2008. The drivers caused several BSOD, so I installed Windows 7 RTM instead, and now it works like a charm.

I’m running VMware Server, so I transferred my VM over easily. The big problem was when I had to change my staging domain to my real domain. Things fell apart from there. The site didn’t load up because the URI was not set before I moved my website. After correcting the URI none of the images loaded up. It turns out that the link to all my images in my posts have been hard-coded with my staging URL.  After several hours scouring the internet I found the simplest solution. I had to export my database and use wordpad to replace my old URL with the new one then import the database back.  In the end it all worked out.

Blog Upgrade

wordpress

It was over a year ago when I was planning to move away from Simple PHP Blog to a more robust blogging engine. Many suggest that I just switch over to one of the many free-hosted blogging sites. I like having my blog hosted on my own server. The fact that I have full control over it gives me piece of mind. I’ve been playing around with Flatpress, a variant of WordPress that uses a flat-file database to store its contents. Flatpress worked well but I felt the development for it was slow and the online community was small. I was adamant about staying away from a blogging engine that required a separate database such as MS or Mysql. I thought it would be too much of a hassle to setup and maintain. The past few weeks I’ve been testing out the latest version of WordPress and I must say it is much easier to manage than I had expected. So I have now dropped Flatpress for testing and now focused WordPress.

What really sold me on WordPress is the vast amount of plugins that are available. I was worried about transferring my movie reviews over and keeping its rating system. With the WordPress Widgets customizing and arranging your content couldn’t be any easier. So for the next few weeks as I upgrade my server from Windows 2003 to 2008 WordPress will be replacing my old blogging platform.

Contemplating a blog upgrade

This blog is about 3 years old and I think it serves its purpose quite well, but the code and design of this blog engine is getting stagnant and outdated compared to other blogs. Blogs are vunerable to spammer placing ads and links in the comment entries and there have been a few days were I spent a good amount of time removing and blocking them. So I’ve been looking at other alternatives for a few weeks now and one of the options that looks to be a winner is FlatPress. There are many other alternatives out there but I was looking for something that does not require seperate database like MSSQL or MYSQL. This blog script, Simple PHP Blog, and FlatPress uses a flat-file database meaning all the blog data is stored in a text file format. Flat-file DBs are great because it allows easy back up of your blog site. You can just zip your root directory and unzip it onto a another web server and you’re ready to go. A blog with a MYSQL backend database will require a backup of the database and the root web directory. And to move the site you have to make sure your new host allows you to have your down DB.So it can get a little complicated and tedious.

If the Simple PHP Blog team doesn’t make any huge updates by the time summer ends I have may have to switch to FlatPress.