I'm using new blog software (again)

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I was getting a lot of comment spam in geeklog. Worse, I'd branched my local code far away from the trunk. So, the thought of an upgrade was scary. I explored around blogs, cmsii, groupware, bbsii, forums and wikis enough to know that I don't need a million plugins for weather or goats.ex. I wasn't looking for a php-nuke knock off. I wanted something that wasn't all baubles and boxes. I'm trying to get away from the news site theme and more into a moblog kind of thing. I needed a clean, secure, and extensible program. I settled on wordpress.

It took about an 3 hours to migrate over the data from geeklog. Its just tedious list and mapping work. I used ms-access over myodbc and just some straight mysql queries. The theme was easy since 1) my theme is dead simple and 2) wordpress is all xhtml + css. Finally, I ported my simple reading, music, definition, wish, and ephemeral lists to wordpress plugins. Then I added word press plugins to add features to the site.

I made some improvements. Wordpress added some improvements. The site's already better for it.

  • I filtered out the comment spam during the transfer
  • mix list is now updated directly from my mp3 player
  • email list to notify people of new articles. If you'd like to be subscribed to the email list contact me.
  • email post, so I can email stories to the website
  • better comment moderation and SpamAssassin filtering
  • more...

This is all on the heels of a general clean up of things.

  • I'm getting around 500 spams a day at jim(a)jimweller.net. I had to setup spam assassin. Hopefully people can email me now. I trained spamassassin up on my last years worth of spam and ham. If your email doesn't get through. Please, call me and I'll look through the spam box.
  • I switched the website to https. It's self signed, but it encrypts which is good enough for this application.
  • I deleted a bunch of old DNS domains I didn't host anymore.
  • I added 15 gigs of mp3 from Dad. The mp3s are all billboard hits from 19550-1969. Pretty cool collection.
  • I upgraded and tweaked awstats to not generate HTML and BODY tags to that it could be encapsulated in my wordpress site (look at awstats)
  • I moved ssh to a non-standard port and switched to PK auth for the root user.
  • I pulled the oracle installation and its cricket graphs. I wasn't using it except to monitor. I have enough oracle to practice at work. Besides, Oracle 9 database monitor is better than what I was doing with cricket.
  • more...

All and all, I'm pretty stoked about the new site. There are still a few dead links. Plus, I have a wish things of things I'd like to see.

  • better way to manage mailing lists. Probably mailman.
  • Web edit, search, and list of my personal lists (mix, books, etc)
  • get email notification setup to right defaults
  • speed up ezStatic plugin
  • hand fix the dead links list
  • round out the topic icons. I did the most popular ones.
  • learn more about newer CSS. Damn that's complicated.
  • Generally tune theme
  • Make CVS match wordpress theme
  • snmp agent out from in front of net-snmp. Back to normal
  • more...

Now, I'm going to go post the wedding web site which Olivia and I worked pretty hard on. The,n after the next bout of homework and tests, I'll post our journal from the honeymoon. Cheers!