Well… I’ve finally moved over to wordpress. Please let me know if anything is broke. The new site feeds are atom: http://www.chrisnelson.ca/feed/atom/, or RSS: http://www.chrisnelson.ca/feed/. You can also set feeds based on the category.
Why? Well, I had a lot of existing content (static html pages, photos, blogger, gallery) but no organization or structure behind it. This meant that a browser was reliant on google or another search engine to find specific content on my site. Now, it’s a bit easier. The majority of my photos and comments are in gallery (www.chrisnelson.ca/gallery, and the majority of my writing, news, and links are in wordpress (where you are right now). The search page lets you search wordpress or gallery – but not both at the same time. I wish wordpress would work with gallery to get some sort of symbiotic mojo going. It would be very nice to integrate the users, search, RSS, etc between the two platforms.
You can also find posts on my page by using the categories or archives. The archives list all content sorted by month. The categories list all content sorted by the category(ies) the post was put into. For example, if you wanted to browse all posts that talked about books, you would click on the books category. I’m still playing with the categories, so if you see something that doesn’t fit, please let me know.
Was it easy? Yes and no. It was very easy to install wordpress (assuming you have some basic web experience), the five minute install is not a lie. But customizing wordpress to do what you want, and figuring out how to store your content was a real time sink. Skeltoac’s blogger import worked well, but I hit a snag with my data. Blogger did not force you to use titles, and I didn’t. WordPress needs titles for stuff like permalinks. You can see where this is going. I had to go through and add titles to all my posts. A pain, sure, but I would have to do that to change the categories for posts anyway. But I wasn’t very bright. I made the title changes in blogger, rather than wordpress. This messed up my blogger permalinks, making a smooth transition impossible. Ah well, live and learn.
I’ve roughly categorized my old content within wordpress, but I have not fixed up existing blogger pages (www.chrisnelson.ca/blog/*). I hope to have some redirects to the newer wordpress version of the content soon. I suspect it will be a manual job though. Strong back, weak mind.
I know there are a few plugins integrating gallery with wordpress. That could be cool.
I’ve seen a couple, but they mostly just deal with skins or hooking into the gallery remote api to add photos. So far it is about the same speed as just editing the html manually so I haven’t played with it too much. I’d love for someone to write some meaty code that hooks into both databases for searches and whatnot.
Mind you, I’m not even ready for that. I am on G1, not G2 (mysql version). And I only have 1 mysql database with my hosting account. But I’m pretty sure I can run gallery and wordpress off the same database…
This one seems about the biggest attempt at integration, but it is still gallery remote hackery I belive.