What I did

I had been using standard Wordpress themes, most recently Bosco 2.0 + Widgets. This was a fine theme, clearly organized and readable, but it was a black box that I never looked into. I needed to get a better understanding of my tools to handle some future projects that I am considering.

One of the tools that I was looking into was Instiki. While reading up on Instiki, I came across this post from Kevin Lawver on how he was using S5 with Instiki.

I loved the look of Kevin’s site (I also enjoyed reading some of his presentations on CSS) so I am giving him the sincerest form of flattery by imitating the general look of his site a Wordpress theme.

I pulled my Wordpress install over to my home machine and went to work. I created a new template, eventually called EarthSea, by copying the Bosco theme to a new directory. I used MAMP to run a local version of Wordpress, CSSEdit to modify the CSS and TextMate to modify the php templates.

It was a really nice combination of tools. CSSEdit allowed me to modify the site CSS styles as I watched. I’d change the font and immediately see the change on my page. I could change the padding on a div by turning the mouse wheel and watching it grow or shrink.

I’m still not a fan of php. Speaking as someone who has used Perl professionally for 10 years, php looks like line noise to me, but it sure is easy poking around directly in the page source.

Also, as someone who has used Emacs for about 20 years, the adjustment to Textmate is slow. I love the look and feel of Textmate, but Emacs key bindings are stuck in my fingers.

I like the way the result looks. The design is much cleaner than any of my previous sites and I think it will be easier to manage and extend.

What next

There are some pages that are missing, mostly because they are placeholders for future work I am planning. I would also like a better version of the archive page and an automatically generated blogroll. I am currently using Google Reader, but I think I want more control than I can get from a simple automated tool.

I also want Atom 1.0 feeds, instead of the current 0.3 versions. The bottom of the sidebar is a little chaotic looking with both RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.3 feeds of both entries and comments. When I get Atom 1.0, I’ll clean that up and probably just move to autodiscovery.

In general, the future direction of this blog is going to be less focused on the technical themes that most interest me — calendars, synchronization, planning for small groups, ruby on rails, application servers — and more on the personal, family and political topics. I’ll still use this as a capture point for technical details that are of broader interest, but the big topics are moving from here and to my technical blog, Cornercases.

Why? The old MovableType was too much trouble to change. The templates were awkward to manage and I was tired of the busyness of the pages. Plus I wanted to be able to create multiple blogs instead of the single omnibus blog that was Yesterday’s Thoughts. Even though WordPress doesn’t support multiple blogs, it is so easy to install, that I can create a new blog in minutes, instead of the hours required for MovableType.

How? It was dead simple. I used MovableType’s export feature following the instructions on this page. I also changed the location of the blog from /blog to /yesterdays and redirected from the old entries to new using a trick with the respective sitemaps.

1. Export MT database
2. Converting database dump UTF-8 with iconv
3. InstallWordPress
4. Import data
5. Installing sitemaps plugin and generate sitemap

Comparing old and sitemaps to generate redirects on Apache

Every thing but the last step took about 20 minutes. I took some time with the last step because I was hoarding my page rank and I didn’t want my site to go weird and lose whatever small ranking I have.

Then I got to play around with themes. This is Clasikue which I like very much.

I have only had two little problems.

In the old set up, I had a simple symbolic link between warmroom.com/index.html and warmroom.com/blog/index.html. That was sufficient to place the main blog page on the front of the site. With dynamic pages, that isn’t possible, and I haven’t figured out how to do it. Suggestions? As of now, I have this blog running out of my Document Root.

The other problem is the visual editor. I spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to format code before I realized that the editor was mangling code inside pre and code tags and also trying to be smart (not!) about closing tags where I wasn’t expecting.