The Inevitable and Awaited Move to WordPress

Warning: This is an extremely nerdy post which most of my readers will care nothing about.

This has been a long time coming.  When I first started my site in 2004, I didn’t really know much about websites, design, blogs, PHP or anything.  So I used the first blog engine I could find and I made my website.  It was b2Evolution.  It was a great engine at the time and in my opinion was easier to use and customize than the others I saw so I chose it.  I outgrew it fast but stuck it out because of how much work it would have taken to move it to another engine.  With the amount of posts and comments that I had, doing it manually was out of the question.  WordPress was looking more and more appealing every day and I designed numerous customers websites with it.  I even taught a workshop on WordPress at the last Free Methodist general conference.

So earlier on this year I paid a coder from Rent A Coder to build me a script that would automatically convert all my posts, comments, categories and permalinks over to WordPress.  So $40 later and she worked her wonder and she was able to do it.  (If anyone is interested I have a script that will convert B2Evolution 2.4.5 install to WordPress 2.7, I’ll sell it for $5 for anyone that asks, just e-mail me).  After learning a few tricks with my .htaccess file I was able to make sure all my links were properly redirected and my new links looked nicer than before.

I’m not completely happy with the new design just yet, but it will do for now.  I thought about using Thesis (which I’d recommend to most users), but I decided I wanted to do it all manually anyway so I went a different route.  I’m also going to try to integrate my photography a little more into this site so I actually have a portfolio somewhere of my shots.  I figured this would be a better idea than starting up an entire new site with a new brand since I wanted to keep it away from Storyboard Solutions.

I used this tutorial to get my flickr badge looking cool, this plugin for Google Analytics,  Share-This for the cool share button at the bottom of each post, ProudBlack is what I started this theme off of.