For a while I had been planning on totally re-designing my website, since effectively things haven’t changed (aside from slight visual changes) since I first created this page and the accompanying blog. This was about 5 or 6 years ago.

I kind of got distracted and fell behind. Oops!

But anyway, as you can see, I finally got around to totally re-doing things. A lot of this had to do with Blogger phasing out support for FTP.  Since I had been relying on Blogger publishing via FTP to my server since 2003 when I initially set up the site, I was pretty much boned and had to find a different solution.  Eventually I decided to switch to the WordPress platform, using it not only for the blog but as a CMS for the entire site.  It took me a little while to find a theme that could be edited to my liking, then I had to take care of importing posts from the old Blogger – I never updated my Blogger platform like 4 years ago when they overhauled their system so I was seriously using some old technology.  On top of that, since I had been using old Blogger with Haloscan for comments, it was near impossible to transfer all my old comments over properly.  I’m still working on that.

As of now, the blog is pretty much completely moved to this new location.  I’m still working on adding back pictures, using Gallery2 as the management system.  I also kind of like the Lifestream plugin (my Lifestream), although right now there’s not much in it except for Tweets and a lot of Diggs.  There are of course still a lot of little bugs and things I’m going to work on over the next few weeks, but at least the page is mostly up and the systems are in place to make using this site (for me) easier.  I pretty much had to give myself a refresher/crash-course in basic HTML and PHP, so it was kind of a fun little project.

I’ll write a bit more about specific things I need to work on still, after the jump.  Yes, I can do that now.  Click on “continue reading” to see the rest of this post.

• Comments before January 2008 aren’t moved over yet.  Unfortunately if I can’t figure out an easy way to automate this, I might have to do it by hand?
• Old blog posts without titles (a lot of my early ones) don’t seem to want to appear on their own permalink pages.  I guess I could go through and add titles to them.  Or I might just leave them since most of those old posts are pretty crap anyway, and since they load fine on archive pages, there’s not a huge need for them to have their own pages.
• On pages without the sidebar (non-blog pages), there’s too much space between the header and the content body.  I know it’s something in my CSS – I think the content wrapper.  But if I remove that, then the posts with the sidebar get pushed too far up.  I need to separate them, but I haven’t played with CSS in several  years so this will take some time.
• Little things, like icons, the Lifestream template, and the Gallery2 page need to be tweaked to look better.