success!

i have fully moved erock.org in two different ways. both of which i had been meaning to do for quite a while.

first, i “physically” moved the site from my midphase to dreamhost. in the past few months, midphase has started to take away features that i specifically chose them for several years ago. things as simple as DNS changes became a major hassle and the price point for the space/bandwidth i was getting became SO FAR OFF the “market” that i would have been stupid NOT to move.

the move went pretty smoothly. i changed all my DNS stuff (it is not just erock.org that i am hosting — i am hosting about a dozen sites, mostly for family and friends…) on an interim basis to zoneedit and changed all the ttl values to insanely small numbers. all of my registrar stuff was handled at godaddy. huge tar balled and gzipped backups were made of everything in the old environment and anything static was updated in the new environment. all of the sites, with the exception of erock.org, went through without any major hiccups…

then came erock.org.

i moved everything mail related first — which went easier than expected. then the web stuff…

for the past few years i have been using drupal as a content management system. (if you have been coming here long enough, you may remember when i started with static pages, went to php-nuke, then postnuke and then drupal…) drupal was great as a cms. but a) i do not have a lot of content to manage and b) it was so feature rich that things tended to bog down. i would definitely use drupal again — just not for my personal stuff. in fact, our wedding website still uses drupal.

so i made the decision to go to wordpress. it is really based more in the blog arena, but is quite extensible. whereas, with drupal, i was constantly taking things out, with wordpress i can put in what i want. the theming engine/paradigm is a bit easier to work with — or at least is more consistent from theme to theme. in the end, i wanted something that really played to the “strength” of the site — which is really random and not-so-random tidbits about me. in other words, a blog.

thankfully, both wordpress and drupal are primarily database driven. i knew i could get most, if not all, of everything out of drupal and into wordpress just based on some sql scripting work. i did a lot of searching/reading for help with the migration and i truly found a few sites — keyboardsamurais.de, vrypan.net and Tom Markiewicz — to be very helpful. (THANK YOU!) however, as much of a help they were in steering me in the right direction, i ended up writing (mostly) my own sql scripts. this allowed me to take the content (all my previous posts), comments on those posts, categories/tags for my posts, all the user data/accounts/logins/passwords for you dedicated erock.org fans (thanks, honey!) and, most importantly, the relationships between all those pieces of data. it took me about 20 hours over the course of a few weeks…

in the past week or so i have been working on the “look and feel” of the site — something else that i knew i wanted to change. the site has looked almost “static” for as long as i can remember, has been generally devoid of colour and just looked very “plain” to me. after more searching/reading, i found a GREAT wordpress theme called “genkitheme” written by (of course!) a guy named eric who lives in singagpore. i spent a few days customizing the hell out of the theme — colours, placement, etc… and i am really happy about how it came out. i am definitely interested in your thoughts!

from a feature/design/site perspective…

• user logins/passwords, etc… are the same. you can use the “login” link under “administrivia”
• email notifications are in tact!
• login system re-tooled with some wp plugins
• categories and tags are now related, joined at the hip, married… there is a complete list under “stuff to read” on the right and it is dynamically generated…
• i am still using gallery for all my photos… (i am using a wrapper/plugin called wpg2 embedded) the “photos” tab on the left will get you there as well as the text links under “stuff to look at”. also included there are thumbnails for random image, newest image, most viewed image, newest album and most viewed album…
• the “home”, “photos” and “contact” tabs on the left hand side will follow you everywhere — up, down, in the photo section…
• there is an rss feed button on the left as well as text links in the administrivia section
• the commenting system is WAY simpler — but you need to be logged in to do it…
• both SK2 and Bad Behavior are being used to chuck bad bots and comment spam
• there are links in each post for “share this” — which will allow you to bookmark/send it with/to places like digg and yahoo! bookmarks
• there are links in each post for printing…
• there is a rating interface for each post — 1 to 5 stars…
• there are post archives — by month — listed in text links under “administrivia”
• there are some site stats available on the right hand side creatively labeled “site stats”
• the search feature — located in the top right of your screen — has been simplified — however… the search does NOT include photos at this point…
• there is pagination at the bottom of the “home” page — it is all based on post date
• there are text ads from google and from amazon.com — please click on them.
• there is colour! woo!
• tons of other stuff… and more upcoming! surf around!

credit where credit is due –

wordpress — i am currently using version 2.2.1

gallery — i am currently using version 2.2 - stable (but i tend to use subversions on a regular basis)

dreamhost — my web hosting provider

“green” as in “carbon credits”…