52 Things – Redo webpage with WordPress

The first one of the 52 Things is one I did in the last few weeks of 2009. It’s:

I’ve had this blog for 10 years. When I first started, the only blogging software was Blogger (this was way before Google bought them) and I used it for a while but then decided I didn’t like it. So I wrote my own code and created my website and for the last ten years, I’ve been maintaining it and updating it. It’s a lot of time-consuming work and if I want a feature (like “let me reply to comments”) I have to code it myself. This can get old really quickly. I was also getting a lot of comment spam and didn’t want to write my own code to battle it.

I’ve been meaning to move to hosted WordPress for several years but I wanted to do it right. I wanted to be able to move all my previous posts and comments and several other features I wanted. I also wanted my side pane back (I’d changed my blog to a single column during the last design about a year ago.) so I’ve spent the better part of the last three weeks doing this webpage.

For those of you who care about the details: It’s using the Atahualpa theme and I’ve customized it quite a bit. I have several plugins installed but the ones I am using most actively are:

• Akismet(for spam)
• Broken Link Checker
• Extended Category Widget(so I can exclude some categories on the side panel)
• FeedBurner FeedSmith (so I can use FeedBurner for my RSS feed)
• Flickr Manager (so I can post from WP to Flickr)
• Inline Ajax Comments (I hacked this plugin a lot so you can leave quick comments from the main page)
• ReplyMe (this emails you when I reply to one of your comments)
• Sociable (This allows you to send my post to a social network of your choice)
• Tumblr Recent Photos Widget (This is how I display the inspiration section on the side panel)
• WordPress.com Stats
• WordPress Database Backup (just in case)
• WP to Twitter (this posts my posts to my twitter stream)

There were a few features on my old webpage which WP doesn’t do elegantly. For example, I wanted to be able to display my tags so you could look at all of them as photos and click on the one you like to see the post. But I didn’t want to upload the photos several times or make a gallery. This took A LOT of hacking but I finally got it to work. Here’s an example. It doesn’t look perfect but it’s pretty close to what I wanted so I am happy with it for now.

That’s about it, I think.

There are still many many things I haven’t done and I will likely tinker with it for the next few months but the large, daunting task is done and I am pretty pleased. I hope you are, too.