Over the last few years I have tried coding my own blog, then WordPress, then Textpattern, then Drupal, then Movable Type. Coding my own was hard. I used WordPress for the longest amount of time but never really thought it was that special. Textpattern was clean and simple but I wanted something full of features. When I moved to Drupal I thought I had really found something amazing. It can do so much, pretty much anything. I loved the theme song and that it had a theme song. I started customizing the install and adding all sorts of modules to make it do everything that I wanted it to do and it was so awesome. The problem I had when I moved from WordPress originally to cleaner or more powerful solutions was that I didn’t feel like posting as much stuff. It might have been harder because it was so powerful or maybe it felt a little bit more grown up so I wasn’t as interested in posting simple stuff. I tried to fix that by moving to Movable Type.
Movable Type is very clean and super fast loading which is nice but I had the same problem that I was less interested in posting stuff. I have looked at the menus and I am not sure what is different but it still feels like posting stuff is just enough out of the way that I wasn’t interested in getting stuff up.
6 years ago from last Tuesday, in the comments for this post WordPress was created and since that is what I had the most success with I thought I would try going back. For all the reasons I switched from WordPress (nothing special, not powerful enough, too slow) those have kind of gone away. It is still a little ordindary, still not the most poweful and still kind of slow but it is and has been improving steadily for the last few yeas. If there is something in another blog publishing tool or CMS that is good enough to switch for, it will end up being in WordPress soon enough anyway. At least that is what I am starting to learn.
As I sit here at Dan’s house working on his laptop and getting his camera ready to go for Santa Fe I just wanted to get back online to my account and finish this post because it is easier and more engaging than the software I had used before. Because this tool (WordPress) is built for blogging that is what it tries to do best. I set up my mobile posting through Flickr like it used to be. I haven’t even thought about just putting one picture up in a long time. It was probably because I got hit in the head so hard.
Fish (pictured left) pointed out that if you had bookmarked elvisripley.com/blog you would be taken to the archive site where nothing was going on.
When I upgraded my site and broke everything, I archived the old site at archive1.elvisripley.com and put the new site here. While I did put a message about the switch on the old site I didn’t have anything on the old site/blog and elvisripley.com/blog was pointed to the old site along with all the old links.
Going forward, if you have a link to my site, bookmark http://elvisripley.com and that will point to the latest version of the site because at some point I will probably archive this site and do something exciting or maybe not. I guess eventually I would.
So even though I was planning on scrapping the site originally, then compromised and decided to keep the old site but stick it at archive1.elvisripley.com so it could still stick around, I have now fixed it so all my old links work with the site. So if your browser was set to go to elvisripley.com/blog that would work again but you would go to archive1.elvisripley.com/blog and as another example elvisripley.com/blog/2006/06/24/dmc-l1-best-camera-so-far would work in case you were curious what the best camera made so far would be. (as of June 2006)
I just did all those examples so I could also see if it worked and have a quick access to a group of links to click and see if it works tomorrow. It should be pretty stable going forward and as long as I don’t have a /blog or /content everyone should be alright. All of the /blog links were from my WordPress based site and the /content links were from my Drupal based site. It would have made a lot of sense to create an archive when I moved from WordPress to Drupal but I didn’t think about it at the time or maybe it didn’t matter.
The big 3 blogging platforms are WordPress, Drupal and Movable Type. I am now on Movable Type after trying the other two and am pretty impressed. It made a big shift in the last couple of years and has adapted to the way the internet has grown. Those are things Movable Type says and it seems like they are right.
I am trying out Movable Type to see how it works with the site. I had been using Drupal but wanted to create multiple sites under the elvisripley.com domain. Drupal didn’t really handle that very well. I am experimenting with Movable Type and it seems to do what I want and handle it the way that I want. I would like to keep my website files neat and tidy without a lot of junk in the root directory or any other directory where I needed to go often. Each site, elvisripley.com/b as an example, can have its own users, settings and look just like it is in independent install of Movable Type or Drupal or WordPress but it has the same log in.
I think the reason I switched from Drupal was because it could do anything you wanted but you had to set it up. I think that for usability it is still another generation away. For a large site I wouldn’t hesitate to use Drupal but for my own site ease of use was what I was most interested in. With Movable Type the only probably I had starting out was the problem of what does Movable Type think it is supposed to be? After I got a hold of that I think I got a good handle on it all. There is also a great iPhone interface for managing posts and comments, that is the kind of thing I am looking for. I don’t want loads of power if I can’t use it easily with my iPhone. Movable Type, because it is more user oriented, will be much more likely to have an iPhone app for management like Windows Live Writer.
Below is a sample of my QuickTime embed code with a nice javascript play button that should work with all templates now. I like that much more than any solution I have found so far. I used to watch Get Smart all the time.
This text was on the homepage while there was no other site content.
Last night I came to a site upgrade and that is the best time to rethink the way my site works. Most of the work involved in my site is keeping the old stuff working. I have switched platforms a few times and keeping all the links constant and the content working was starting to be a pain and it also limited me greatly. I have moved everything over to archive1.elvisripley.com and it works fine. I will change the look to keep it more in line with how it used to look. You might notice that is called archive1. That is because now that I have done this it wasn’t so bad so I will probably do this more in the future. Also now that I have archived the whole site and see myself doing it in the future I can plan for that and keep my files and code much cleaner than it had been. I try to keep my email inbox at zero and have gotten pretty good at it but my site was getting sluggish to work with, maybe more like a snail because it had barriers in addition to being slow and gross.
I am evaluating the current state of the internet to decide which direction will be best for the site but also for me to use because that is the most important thing. If it is easy I will be much more interested in using it.
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