Site Updates: Sections and Feeds
Here is another update on some improvements I’ve made to this site.
First, apologies for my RSS feeds spewing old entries back into your readers. I’m not completely sure why it’s happening, but I think it has something to do with pushing some of these entries into new sections.
New Sections
I’ve added a few sections: Posts, Photographs and Events. The original section I imported the WordPress entries into was called ‘Articles’. Since then, I’ve shuffled a few of those entries into these new sections where applicable. I’ve added feeds for each new unique section. The Site Feed will send you everything. And then each other feed will deliver only the content for which it is named.
Posts vs Articles
Articles will still be the most important content and will trend toward the topics of technology and web. They won’t appear daily, but the content will be as solid as possible.
Posts are going to come much faster and be less polished. Think of posts as a microblog. I wanted something in between my short updates on Twitter and more formal articles. Posts will probably be all over the place topically—about normal for me. :) I will probably figure out some way to highlight posts on the front-end, more than titles in the sidebar.
Photographs and Events
Photographs are photographs. :)
Events are not listed in any feeds yet. However, I did want to highlight events at which I’ll be speaking, so they are in the sidebar for your perusal. If you are attending any of these events, please let me know. It is fun to connect!
New Feeds
Grab what you want. If you are already subscribed to a feed, chances are it is hooked up as a site feed.
Migration to ExpressionEngine
Last night, I spent a few hours migrating this site from WordPress to ExpressionEngine. I made the decision long ago, perhaps nearly two years back. But I haven’t found the time to make it happen until now. Plus, I had a couple of failed starts in the past because the migration process between these two systems isn’t exactly simple. Finally, I pushed through and managed to import all posts and comments into EE in one fell swoop. There was some clean-up after that, but it was mostly straightforward. It was certainly easier that attempting to move the WordPress entries to the EE database manually. :)
So now I’m all set here. I’ll outline a few items that I did in the process.
- Uploaded ExpressionEngine Core 1.6.4 into a subfolder and ran the install process
- Added “Articles” weblog and custom fields
- Imported posts and comments from WP into weblog entries and comments using mt-import.php
- Switch URL word separator to dash (-)
- Threw some SQL at the database to update the imported records from underscore to dash
- Learned a lesson about importing: switch URL word separator to dash and then import
- Converted the WordPress “theme” into EE templates
- Moved entries that were WP “pages” into EE template (static) pages
- Moved WP files in subfolder and moved EE files into main folder
- Updated all paths in EE to reflect new base path
- Removed index.php from the URL structure (.htaccess)
- Added Rewrite rules to help traffic to old links find the right place in the new URL structure
- Repaired several markup and style issues and performed general cleanup
- Added categories (None were transferred during the import)
- Update nav to use EE template tags for category list
- Added archive template
- Fixed midsection to reflect archive and latest comments
- Updated Gravatar support
- Fixed and tweaked many small items, like <title> structure, pagination, etc.
- Decided to make sure all this works by publishing something
- Published this
If you have any specific questions about the process, let me know. If you are interested in moving your site from WordPress to ExpressionEngine, I think you’ll find the search results online now render much better results than in the past.
About a year ago, someone mentioned Twitter to me. If I recall correctly, it was my friend and digital ally, Justin Thorp. I signed up, looked at the home page for a moment and went on my way—elsewhere.
In January, I decided to really give Twitter a solid go. I signed in, found a few friends and started updating. Within a few days, I was really beginning to enjoy the community aspect of Twitter. I tied in my mobile phone and “tweeted” more frequently.
A couple of months later, the light bulb moment happened. I was at SXSW in Austin, Texas. It seemed like everyone there was on Twitter. So many amazing events unfolded at the conference, many of them driven by conversation on Twitter. Who can forget the botched interview of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg? Quite literally, the emotion of the crowd was driven by 140-character rants on Twitter. The sheer power of communicating in such a simple way was astounding.
Today, I think I’ve come full circle in my opinion of Twitter. It is fantastic and it is garbage. For community, it has few real rivals right now. But as web applications go, it is really nothing special. In fact, Twitter is routinely down and struggling because of the volume of traffic on the site and poor development. Yet it remains a constant for many people throughout the workday or weekend.
Twitter has its own language, built around tweets, tweeps and at-replies. But Twitter really is a simple thing. It truly is about the simple question, “What are you doing?” (Feel free to extend that to “thinking, feeling, studying”, etc.) And it matters, I think. Sure, not everything that happens on Twitter has intrinsic value. But I think the ultimate ROI can be significant. Follow the people you care about. Find new friends or re-connect with old friends. Leave the rest alone.
If you’d like to follow me on Twitter, you will get much more information about the things I am interested in, what is happening at work, at home and everywhere in between. Just hit http://twitter.com/davidrussell.
I’ll follow you as well. Let me know how to reach you on Twitter.
