I’m not satisfied with my theme and configuration yet, but the primary content of this blog is now in place. Here are some ‘tech specs,’ so to speak, about how I set things up.
Hosting
My site is hosted on Dreamhost, and I used their one-click install of WordPress. I have no opinion on doing it this way versus a normal manual install, but it seems to have worked fine.
Imported content
This has been the most interesting and time consuming activity so far. One of the primary reasons I chose to use WordPress, as opposed Blogger, was because of the robust import capabilities. I had five years worth of posts on three different platforms to incorporate.
- LiveJournal: I experimented with several methods and ended up using ljArchive, which was recommended to me by Paul and the built-in Livejournal->Wordpress importer. The pros are that you only have to import one file and it includes comments, and the only real con is that posts without titles are assigned a number.
- Xanga: This one was easy: I just followed the steps provided by Reid, which required paying $4 to get a Xanga premium account and downloading the Xanga Archive Importer for WordPress.
- Upsaid: In 2004 Upsaid discontinued free accounts, so I archived my blog by manually saving each post as an html file. Having learned with Xanga that it was possible to write a custom importer based on an HTML format (which is what Xanga archives are), I set out to make my own for Upsaid. Here are the basic steps I took:
- Clean up the HTML files and combine into a single file: I started with 80 complete html files, and wrote a Python script to strip out unnecessary content (in this case, anything before and after ) and write all the outputs to a single file.
- Write a PHP importer: I copied the Xanga importer file, xanga.php, and modified the function import_posts(). Mostly I just changed what regular expressions should be used to identify the post title, content, date, and comments, but I did have to update date-time logic considerably because the date and time were located separately on the page in non-standard formats.
Design
I again turned to Paul for help on this one. I liked the clean minimalism of his blog and the tidy, collapsed archive format, so I copied the blog.txt theme and Collapsible Archive Widget. I’m still playing around with layout and widgets so the design will probably keep changing for a while.
Integration & compatibility
- Authentication: I set up OpenID for commenting using the WP-Open plugin as more because it seemed like a cool, forward-thinking web thing to do than for any particular technical reason.
- Search Engines: I use Google Webmaster Tools to track my site’s search-engine visibility and found a handy plugin which generates a Google-compliant XML Sitemap. It even allows you to add non-Wordpress pages to the sitemap and notifies major search engines when it has been updated.
- Analytics: Another useful plugin I’m using is the Google Analyticator, which automatically embeds Google Analytics tracking code on all pages managed by WordPress without having to manually edit any template files.
- RSS: I created a Feedburner feed for my blog and installed the FeedSmith plugin to automatically detect all ways to access my feed and redirect them through FeedBurner.
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