Well, I’ve finally jumped into the conversion into WordPress rather than Movable Type. It’s been quite interesting getting used to the new system, but I think WordPress has more than enough power to get things done, plus some very advanced features. I’m not a PHP guru, but getting used to the WordPress template system has been far more painless than you’d think.
There will be more changes as the site redesign and development progresses. The old files still exist, so all the permalinks should work until I figure out how I want to do the redirection. I’ll be rolling out some new features over the next few weeks, depending on how much time I have between work and moving myself to new digs.
In the meantime, feel free to poke around the new site, and let me know if there’s anything I’ve broken (and believe me, there will be things broken – but at least I get to keep both pieces)…
UPDATE: Amazingly enough, this page actually validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict, for standard-compliance junkies like myself. Hooray for me…
I like the new layout very much, Jay.
How easy was it to import your MT “stuff” into wordpad? Random Nuke Strikes is a multi-author blog, so I’m pretty much hosed if I ever upgrade MT beyond v2.6. I don’t really mind MT making a profit, but the license agreement seems a bit harsh for me. We are about to do a site redesign at RNS, and I wonder if I should do a switchover from MT to something and redesign the site, all in one fell swoop. I’m definitely not a web guru, and working with MT templates has been a sometimes frustrating exercise for me.
Importing old entries into WordPress is very easy. All you have to do is export all your old MT entries in a text file, save that text file on your server, modify one line of code, and run the import script. All of my nearly 4000 entries and 6200 comments imported in minutes. It’s actually much easier than upgrading between MT 2.6 and MT 3.0.
Hi Jay, I was wondering how you did the shadowing effects around the main window. I’m also looking for an RSS feed for the main site, but can’t find it. Can you point me in the right direction?
The shadow is actually a background image on the main body tag – you can see how its done on the CSS file if you like. It’s a popular technique right now, so I felt the need to steal it…
The RSS feeds are http://www.jayreding.com/wordpress/feed/rss/ and http://www.jayreding.com/wordpress/feed/rss2/
There’s also an Atom feed at http://www.jayreding.com/wordpress/feed/atom/
That reminds me that I really should add those feeds to the site… 🙂
Eventually I’m going to do a piece on some of the techniques I used like the alternating colors for the comments as a reference piece for other WordPress users…
Dang, and I’ve been trying to do this by div layers. This way is a lot easier. NO size guessing!
I think a “shadow” border style is sorely missing from the CSS spec. But I’m not sure if they want to include gradients into a specification about styles.
Looking pretty good!
If you want some good tips on CSS design, I get most of my good stuff from A List Apart – they always have good tips and tricks for building better sites using standards-compliant code.