This is, according to WordPress, the 600th post I’ve made since I started Solitude way back in January 2003. A lot of time has passed, lot of changes, and lot of silly things said (as well as the odd gem). I did consider going back through the entire archive and pointing out all the places I disagree with myself, but I figure that could take a while.
No grand promises about posting more, or better, or anything like that; just a marker to say we’re still going.
Things have been quiet here for the last few months for a number of reasons: moving flat, getting internet back, changing jobs (within the same company), and a bunch of other reasons (some of which I’ll be mentioning soon).
One of the big reasons for a slowdown in the number of posts is that I’ve been unhappy with my current content management system, Finetto, for quite some time. It was designed with a fairly limited amount of functionality in mind, primarily to help out a friend who needed a CMS quickly. It was also one of the first big PHP projects I had undertaken, before I really understood the language, and while I was still quite fresh to real programming (I have been programming since I was about 8 but not in a consistent and structured way). The design quickly became messy as more features were required. I could go back and rewrite the whole thing, with some interesting ideas, or I could just enhance an existing product.
In the last month or so, I’ve taken the time to pull data out of the old CMS and migrate it to everyone’s favourite CMS, Wordpress. I’ve been talking about doing this for a while, and one of my long stated goals for any such transition is that it would be functionally seamless for end users. Since I actually switched a few weeks ago and no-one seems to have noticed, I’ll call that one a success. As an aside, the recent feed problems were not related to the WP switch.
The switch itself was pretty painless. WP is easy to set-up, the design I used on the old CMS was easy enough to convert (using standards-based design helps), and the data was easy enough to migrate on the WP side. The only trick was actually pulling the data out of the old CMS. While it’s file-system based storage was exceptionally quick, it wasn’t the easiest to manipulate.
Expect some WP plugins to appear soon.
Apologies for any recent feed problems you’ve been experiencing. As part of an effort to try and consolidate all my feeds (about 6), I’ve decided to outsource the URL to something a bit more permanent, in the form of FeedBurner.
There was a rather silly problem with cyclical redirects, but it’s all sorted now. I advise that you change your subscription to the Solitude FeedBurner Feed, if your feed reader of choice has not already done so.