Never one to stick with the same software for too long, I’ve switched the blog from Textpattern to WordPress. WordPress has been creating a tremendous amount of buzz the past few days after the big MovableType 3.0 Licensing changes came out. Initially, I had looked into WordPress for my blog, but the software seemed to “rough around the edges.” Let me tell you that right now it’s the slickest thing I’ve used. The backend is quick and loaded with features. And stability isn’t much of an issue since version 1.2 came out yesterday.

WordPress also has a large developer base and is licensed under the GPL. Textpattern, on the other hand, is developed solely by one person (Dean Allen) and has a non-free license.

The switch over was relatively painless, I used the import script provided by the WordPress installation to move all my posts over. (I did heavily modify the script to maintain post id’s, categories, and links—If you are interested in my modifications, shoot me an email at froe0071@umn.edu).

The style sheet was graciously taken from the WordPress CSS Style Competition. It is entitled Buddha and was created by Hadley Wickham.

Look for new features soon, like Asides, Since Last Visit, Style Switcher, and Stats.

Update: The import-textpattern.php script that I used is now available. It’s still a little rough around the edges, but worked well enough for me. I had to turn magic quotes on for the script to work (set_magic_quotes_runtime(1); at the top of the file).

Daniel Vine came up with a remote browser-testing service so that those of us without Windows PC’s can test to make sure our websites look ok.

I checked this webpage out and while it’s not necessarily the prettiest thing (I forgot how horrible font handling was in Internet Explorer), it at least works.

Update: I just found out that this is the same guy who made the ever-so-cool iCapture, a similar program that shows how webpages look under Mac browsers.

UThink: Blogs at the University Libraries is a new project by the University of Minnesota to offer unlimited free blogs to all staff/students/faculty. The system is easy to configure and get started—just login with your x500 and give them a title/tagline for your blog. For example, I got one setup in under 5 minutes or so.

It’s easy to add new posts (just the standard MovableType interface), but perhaps not so obvious if you have never used it before. They do an okay job trying to offer some links to tutorials/help sites, but there’s no direct hand-holding along the way.

I find it relieving (and quite interesting) that they left all the power-user features of MT (like being able to customize all of your pages with templates) in place. However, the beginning user is likely to get confused and will have a tough time fixing any mistakes if they go messing around.

I found the lack of installed plugins depressing, especially since the individual user will have no power to install “personal” plugins for themselves. At a bare minimum, I’d recommend installing MT Textile which significantly speeds up the time it takes to write, and allows beginning users to easily add links and such.

I think it will be interesting to see how adoption goes, especially since it looks like they will be providing each user ample space (they assumed 180mb per user or something like that per 3 years). It also has the benefit of no ads and quick loading times. The only detractor is their obligatory legal statement on the bottom of every page:

The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author.
The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by the University of Minnesota.

However, that is easily circumvented with a little bit of css, namely by adding the following to the styles-site.css template.

h5{ display:none; }

Another feature that many people (namely those coming from blogging “communities” like Xanga and LiveJournal) will miss is the ability to “subscribe” to other people’s posts and quickly view new entries. Albeit, this problem is easily survived with RSS readers (like the excellent Net News Wire), I don’t think enough of the users will understand such a concept.

I’d like to also take this time to introduce all of you to a thing called RSS (Really Simple Syndication). Essentially you can get a free RSS Reader which every so often (ie: hourly) checks a bunch of news feeds (ie: each one of the blogs you read) and alerts you when there are updates.

It’s kinda (well totally) geeky, but it’s slick and can save bunches of time.

Oh, and for those curious enough to actually try, the RSS URL for Xanga sites is for example http://www.xanga.com/rss.aspx?user=froehle, obviously replacing “froehle” with the username of whoever you want.