After a little over five years of using my custom blog engine, I decided that it was time to switch to something else. (Even though it never technically had a name I’ll refer to it as nvJournal for the sake of brevity here). Although I had a lot of fun writing it and adding features over the years, I felt that the time it would take me to extend it further was more than I wanted to spend. So I up and switched to WordPress. I know, right? But it’s working out pretty well so far.
One of the big reasons for switching was so I can use MarsEdit. I was getting really tired of having to write all my posts in the browser and nvJournal didn’t have any sort of API support. Thus, I either had to write an XML-RPC interface or switch to something that did. There was also the lack of support for drafts. With nvJournal it was either published or not (I could publish privately, but then I’d have to dive into the database and manually edit the date when I posted).
nvJournal’s admin interface was also slightly… limited. It worked well enough for writing new posts, but management wasn’t so hot. I only ever got around to listing the twenty most recent posts and then throwing in a box where I could enter the ID of an old post to edit it.
So a couple weeks ago, I grabbed a copy of WordPress, threw up a test domain, and started playing. Obviously the first task was to get my old blog imported. It didn’t take too long to figure out the WordPress export format, so I was able to generate a file for import pretty quickly. I had to tweak a couple of core files to get my post IDs to carry over, but after that, it was smooth sailing.
Then I needed to settle on a design. I’ve been playing with ideas for the post-Whiteroom design since, oh, July of 2005. Nothing ever quite stuck though and I let it stagnate for a couple years. I finally picked things back up last spring, but again, none of the designs felt quite right. Then I tried again in the fall but it was the same story. However, this time, the stars aligned as I hit on the idea of a dirty, worn version of the circles logo that I used in 2003. It’s always been my favorite nanovivid logo by far, so I decided it was time to bring the circles back.
After a lot of pixel pushing, I finally ended up with the design you see here. Of course, I had to go and implement it in HTML, but that surprisingly ended up being fairly easy. There really weren’t too many cross-browser issues to work around this time, largely because the design is much simpler than the last one. And hey, my site is now properly IE7 compatible, so… yay?
Please let me know what you think of the new design. I think the only outstanding issue left is user accounts, and I’ll post once I have that worked out. I’m going to do my best to migrate them over. I hope the redesign and move to WordPress will mean that I will be a bit more likely to blog than in the past couple of years. But we’ll see how that goes.
♫ Basement Jaxx - Same Old Show
