Follow up: February’s Move to WordPress (Again)

In February, I made the decision to move back to WordPress after over two years of using my own blog system / Habari. It was a combination of lack of time to keep things secure (compared to WordPress which has single-click upgrade) and the need to have somewhere I could quickly “just write” without juggling maintenance + toddler.

So anyway, follow-up. How do I feel about it now? Great decision, looking back. Don’t get me wrong, I miss Habari. It was quirky, fast and simple; a well-coded system. The path which WordPress is taking though is fascinating. It would be no exaggeration to say that WordPress stuff has formed the bulk of my work for clients this year, and I have had the opportunity to learn/try out so many awesome things.

One project I’m currently bringing to completion is the migration of an existing e-commerce store to a WordPress backend, using custom post types to power the product section and custom taxonomies to tag/categorise products. This tagging, and the power of WordPress’ built-in queries/functions, has allowed me to create a massive bespoke faceted navigation (think Amazon where you drill down the options on the side … Shoes > Size 7 > Brown > etc) in just a few hundred lines of code.

How is this related to my blog? Well, I’m excited by it, and I don’t get excited by code that often any more. :P I can’t wait until the project is live and I have the time to share some of the neat stuff I’ve written / what WP can do & improve THIS site too. Watch this space…

Posted on: December 21, 2011 · Category: Work

Thank you Google, you twat

So, if you’d not noticed already, I converted my blog to WordPress yesterday. I know, I know, I told WordPress to suck my balls. Apparently things change, not least because of a half-dead install of Habari thanks to me installing an unstable night-release (don’t ask why, I don’t know).

It was actually quicker to migrate Habari back to WordPress than it was trying to wrangle my back-up onto the server, replacing the changed files etc and as time is a precious commodity these days that’s what I did.

Unfortunately, in my haste to get a working blog running, I forgot to block off the test install at /wordpress/. Google, while both magnificent and impressive in its speed, has pissed me right off by indexing shitloads of content under /wordpress/ … I don’t even begin to understand how it FOUND it, given that it wasn’t linked from anywhere.

Anyway, point being my SERPs and feed will be all over the shop for a while until things settled down. I can only apologise.

(Note: this is not the end of my love affair with Habari … but more coming on that soon ;) )

Posted on: February 16, 2011 · Category: Geek, Interwebs, WTF

Ooops, broke it

Broken my Habari, bear with me ;D

*whispers I converted back to wp whispers*

Posted on: February 15, 2011 · Category: Geek

Does this work?

Just updated to the latest dev release of Habari, so hold on while I figure out what’s broken :)

ETA: tags are broken, oh dear.. (trac ticket)

Posted on: January 1, 2011 · Category: Geek

Wonky Wonky

Things might look a bit wonky this morning as I update Habari and modify my theme a little (backend stuff, you won’t really see any changes).

Posted on: November 20, 2010 · Category: Geek