Well, you can’t have failed to notice the entire change-around on here since about 6PM tonight. For the past few months, I’ve been trying to switch my blog over from “Blogger”, the Google-ran web logging service, which has been my home for almost 6 years. Due to a lack of features which I really would have liked, I took the decision to move my blog from there, to Wordpress, a database-driven piece of blog software, which I can host locally on Mercuryvapour. And it’s free. OK, Blogger is free too, but that’s not my problem.
This blog is made up of almost 600 posts. Let’s just round it up to 600, for easy’s sake. That means that previously there were 600 different HTML files, all approximately 20K in length. 600×20k = lots of disk space. With the fact that this is database driven there are only one set of pages, at probably something like 50k (haven’t checked), and when someone requests a page, it gets pulled from the database, and the text gets added to these one set of pages.
I can also edit blog entries instantly, either editing them through Wordpress, or editing the database manually. And, changing the template is a simple case of uploading one, changing what I need, then accepting it. the whole site then automatically takes on that template.
The next few weeks are going to be a total experiment, as although I might look like I know what I’m doing, I really, very probably , don’t.
Now, all good things have an upside, and, inevitably, a downside. The downside with switching software is that all of the old posts instantly become obselete, so all links that have been put into search engines, etc. no longer work. I’ll need to wait until the next webcrawl from Google before this switchover starts taking effect.
I’ll also need to reset all of my links. Most of them were dead, or no longer updated anyway, so that’s not a problem.
The “Blogroll” is an idea I like. Though, I’m not sure whether the writers purposely parodied “Bog Roll” or not…
EDIT: I’m going to update this post with things I love about Wordpress. Because I’m finding something new every time I use it. While pissing about with comments, I accidentally deleted that last post you see above you, about the streetlight, etc. But, no matter. Because, thanks to the one-click backup I’d made (which emails directly to my Gmail account) seconds after I finished the posting, I was able to log on to gmail, download the backed up database (which is already compressed for me), and search for the post. Each post is simply an SQL query (INSERT INTO, etc) and is only on one line. So, I copied and pasted the full line into the query box in phpMyAdmin, and vroom! Instantly the post was back! Nobody would ever notice it was gone!
Also, editing the links on the side was a piece of piss. Those are also stored in the database, so it’s a 10-second job to edit those.
Previously, with blogger, if I changed anything on a page and wanted it to go site-wide, I’d need to publish each and every page.
Technorati Tags: database, sql, wordpress
