I wasn’t too impressed with the changes made to Bleugger yesterday. That’s a lie. I couldn’t give a damn one way or another but it seemed like a good chance to finally switch over to using a new blogsystem, namely Wordpress.

I’ve been messing with it for a while (every since Lyle mentioned it) and thought I’d give it a go. Just to make it a little easier, I made sure that the look and feel of the blog stayed the same although there’s another stylesheet in the works as previously mentioned. Much time was spent adjusting the template, learning the functions and then writing an extra piece of code to import all my old blogkomm comments into the system. But everything seems to be there.

So why Wordpress and not MoveableType? The main reason is that WP doesn’t require Perl and is a straightforward PHP/MySQL based system. And I have full control over it.

And I get to do this…

Isn’t that clever. I do want to change it so that it’s all inline though. It’s the same with comments - when you enter a comment, the display changes to show only the current post and there’s no way of navigating backwards or forwards or back to the main list. But I’m working on this and other teething problems.

I’ve also ditched the Blogroll in favour of WP’s built in links at the expense of having them display in the order they were last updated. The links are still the same but whether or not I reintroduce the Blogroll will depend on how I find the system.

It’s going to take some getting used to but I hope that the benefits of self contained management (i.e. being able to post as long as the sites up and not having to depend on someone elses server being up), full customisation (as far as my PHP knowledge extends - but hey, I did write a blogkomm import function!) and a database driven backend will far outweigh any of the downsides.

Only time will tell. That is, if it doesn’t kill me first!