Welcome to jmadigan.net v3.0

Hello, and welcome to the third redesign of jmadigan.net. I’ve been meaning to convert the site’s content management system from Movable Type to WordPress for some time now, but never hit the annoyance or motivation levels necessary to do it. This changed recently, though when the site pretty much just stopped working. I would write a post and tell the blog “Hey, here you go, post this,” at which point the blog would do the computer equivalent of staring off into space and pretending that it couldn’t see me. So I gutted it.

I wish I had done it a lot sooner. WordPress is an orders of magnitude better system, and the installation and importation of my 1,289 posts, 2,005 comments, over 14,000 files (including several hundred photographs) was a snap. After tweaking the CSS files a bit to achieve the green and orange color palate, I’m back in business.

Good stuff about the new system and site:

  • It works and I can post new articles and comments without having the server time out. This is somewhat important.
  • It’s super easy to create photo galleries and I don’t have to manually create thumbnail images. WordPress does it for me.
  • You can browse photos for a given post in a cool overlay and go straight to other photos a by clicking next/prev links. Scroll down to the previous post on Halloween and try it.
  • Better comment spam protection and Gravatar images.
  • Easier to maintain my lists of read/saw/played media.
  • Clean design is cleaner.
  • Oh, yeah, the HTML and CSS is generally better and not broken on account of my having coded almost none of it.

    The one major downside to the move is substantial, though. All my links are broken. Like, ALL of them. This includes links from one blog post to others, and links to photographs. I’m pretty sure I could have solved all or some of this through some kind of httaccess redirects or some other wizardry, but you know what? Screw it. I’m just going to go back and fix each one of the posts that need it by hand. The ones with lots of photographs are mainly the ones that need it, and I want to redo those to get the new galleries anyway. I’m just going to do 5 or 10 entries per day.

    So anyway, enjoy the site. If you notice something in the archives that doesn’t look right, don’t worry. It’ll probably get fixed within a year.

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