Seems to work. Probably won’t make me blog anymore, however.

Installed a new look for the blog today. Nothing fancy…in fact, pretty stripped down. I’m debating a new look/CMS for my business site — debating Wordpress vs. Mephisto. I could pretty easily do what I need with either, but I want to incorporate a blog directed toward my clients, so I need to do something.

Updating the look of this site a little was mostly an excuse to play with Wordpress themes a bit to see how I like it. Pretty simple if you start with a “blank” theme and don’t have to actually touch the PHP.

I upgraded to Wordpress 2.1, mostly to avoid doing some work I should probably should be doing. Smooth as silk. And some nice improvements. Most notably a tabbed interface for the “write post” window that lets you switch back and forth from WYSIWYG and code editing. Oh, and thankfully the default post category is no longer pre-selected. I never liked having to uncheck “Misc” before marking where it really belongs.

Something I had setup in Conversant and missed in Wordpress is the “Last year” listing, which has now been added to the sidebar on this site. Briefly shows 5 topics on the blog from one year ago at this time. This is actually my first WordPress coding, so I don’t know if it’s a bit sloppy, but here’s how I got it to work…

<h3>Last year</h3>
  <ul>
  <?php
    $year = date('Y');
    $month = date('m');
    $lastyear = $year - 1;
    $posts = get_posts('numberposts=5&year=$lastyear');
    global $wpdb;
      $posts = $wpdb->get_results ("SELECT " .
        "* " .
        "FROM $wpdb->posts " .
        "WHERE ( TO_DAYS( NOW() ) - TO_DAYS( post_date ) ) > 364 " .
        "ORDER BY post_date DESC " .
        "LIMIT 5" );
    ?>
  <?php
    foreach($posts as $post):
      setup_postdata($post);
      ?>
      <li><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
    <?php endforeach
  ?>
  </ul>
  

If you are one of the folks who prefers to receive my blog via email, I’ve installed the subcribe2 WordPress plugin. See the subscribe page for the appropriate links to setup your subscription.

Let me know if you have any problems with it. I installed it, and have subscribed myself and successfully received the last few posts, but I haven’t tested it as a non-admin users. Note that it’s nowhere near as cool as Conversant’s email interface. You can’t respond to the email posts and have them work as comments or anything.

I installed the Structured Blogging WordPress plugin, thus the review which preceded this post. I’m very interested in Microformats, particularly for iCal and vCard use, and plan to implement them in an upcoming app at work.

I haven’t dug into how the plugin implements it’s hooks, but it’s well embedded in WordPress and nicely handles the different presentation and editing need of the different formats, without the complexity of having a wide variety of custom fields to structure the data. It certain is less flexible in terms of pure data manipulation, but for simple presentation content like this, it works quite well. Cool stuff.

If you don’t have Tails installed in Firefox, you should try it out as well. It recognizes Microformats and allow alternate sidebar presentation and access to that structured content.

After much consideration, hestitation and general mixed feelings about the idea, I’ve decided to move into a new blog. This is blog is powered by WordPress. I’ve imported all my old content back to when I started blogging in Conversant in early 2000 (I blogged in Manila for a bit before that).

Conversant continues to be a great blogging/CMS platform, and I have a lot of attachment to it since I’m a major contributor to the codebase — however, I’ve been trying to do a number of things to force myself out of my comfort zone lately, and this is one of them.

So here I am. Continuing to spew my usual mix of randomness into the void.