Sorry that I didn't get right back to the second part of "Speed Kills the Christian Soul." I was, uh…overwhelmed with things to do. Like 19-hour days kind of overwhelmed. More posts are about my own existence than I care to admit.
Physician heal thyself, indeed!
A few people have informed me that the new site has been slow to load. I'm fixing that, albeit slowly. For some reason WordPress defaulted to showing a whole month's worth of posts; I've since cut that back to ten days, so that sped things up considerably.
I'm struggling with categories displaying how I'd like them to. I've installed the King Categories and Folding Categories options, but they're not working at all despite reinstalls and the massive PHP-tweaking I've done in the appropriate files.
In the end, that's the dirty little secret about WordPress: you've got to hand-edit EVERYTHING. WordPress is to blogging what an old '57 Chevy is to a car nut. You buy it in workable condition, but to get it to do (and look) the way you want, be prepared to spend untold hours in the garage. And those little custom flourishes? Well, they break everything they contact when you put them in. And like everything else, some of the parts are roughly equivalent to blackmarket parts from shady dealers, shady quality included.
I've not forgotten about the Godblog map for referring people and projects. I've got to get Cerulean Sanctum up and running, then my business site going. That latter one is critical now and it's consuming me. I was going to stick with WordPress, though with a static front page, but after seeing Joomla in operation, I suspect I'll be gravitating to it. If Joomla had better blogging capability, Cerulean Sanctum may have gone that way, too. Still may do that if WordPress continues to be so variable. The Joomla developers are raving about v1.5, but it's still vaporware, failing to meet it's deadline of April's end for launch. Never a good sign. Think Windows Vista here.
And now the pleading:
If you have Cerulean Sanctum on your blogroll, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE update the link from
http://www.dedelen.com/cerulean.html
to
Technorati says that 320 blogs that link here have not made the switch. The old site will probably live on for a year, but then it's toast. That I promise. So please update your blogrolls as soon as it is convenient. And thanks for linking here.
I know the content has been weak lately, but I promise better things in days to come. I'm finishing up A.W. Tozer's Whatever Happened to Worship and almost every paragraph has a week's worth of blogging potential. Look for that in days to come.
Thanks for being a reader. Hang in there. I'll wrap up the "Speed Kills" two-parter on Monday or Tuesday.
Blessings!
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6 Comments
Hey Dan, I know that you probably have already done this, but did you check into textpattern. I used it on a site, and learning it was easy, it’s powerful, well documented, and has a huge community. Just thought I’d throw that out there, good luck with everything.
Dan -
Updated link in my blogroll. Now there are only 319 … it sounds like you have a mess on your hands.
HIS NAME IS GREAT AND GREATLY TO BE PRAISED
PS Your mess was lifted up in prayer.
Rick,
Text pattern is a good tool, but it has nothing intuitive about it. You look at it and are stymied at where to start.
For me, intuitiveness is EVERYTHING. The best programs in the world are those you can begin using immediately. I think one of the best in this regard is Filemaker Pro, the database originally designed by Apple. Extremely powerful database software that can be used without reading the instructions. Compare that with MS Access (horrid to use and totally counter-intuitive) and MySQL (abominably horrid to use, though slightly more intuitive than Access).
WordPress made more sense in that regard. Is it better than Textpattern? Well, a lot of Textpattern users fled to WordPress after WP’s 2.0 release. I suspect that’s for the same reason I mentioned above. I can see how Texpattern is more effective for a total site, but Joomla blows both WP and TP away in that regard (though Joomla is not necessarily as intuitive as WordPress. Its total power makes it more complex, but it’s close enough.) Joomla’s admin is awesome compared with both the others, though I like the clean interface of TP. I’d like to see what version 1.5 of Joomla holds. It may ultimately power my business site.
Thanks for writing!
John,
The biggest mess of all was the difference between WordPress and Blogger post_names. That’s a killer. I literally have to go back and re-edit every Blogger post to fix the post-name so that my old references to posts work and that other people’s links to those same posts work if I redirect.
Though I know that a “per post” redirect is possible, I have not discovered the call. I need to go from this permalink link format:
http://www.dedelen.com/{year}/{month}/{post_name}
to
http://ceruleansanctum.com/{year}/{month}/{post_name}
I need the redirect at http://www.dedelen.com to redirect every post call to the corresponding ceruleansanctum call. I’ve heard that this can be done with a single generic redirect , but I can’t find it listed anywhere. That call is the reason I have 400 Blogger-converted WordPress posts to edit! I’m trying to keep my Google ranking and eliminate the penalty Google imposes for having duplicate content in two different domains (that’s a big penalty.)
The other penalty is having all your outside links pointing to two different sites, as you noted. Having a tool that checks all your links would be nice. In theory, Technorati does this. But I challenge you to get Technorati to actually list them all. It will list perhaps the first twenty, but when you click that link at the bottom of the list asking for all the links? Forget it. I’ve never had Technorati give me anything else but the “Sorry, we’re too busy handling a million other requests to serve up your complete set of links, although this is what we advertise ourselves as doing for everyone.” Needless to say, Technorati and I have a mutual dislike.
So I’m now MANUALLY collecting those links via Google, Blogline, IceRocket, Feedster, and any other blog search tool that will offer them up. The sad truth is that not a single one of those lists the entire pantheon of links. Each has their blind spots. Sites that use a built-in mailer rather than a simple “mailto:” call make this harder. Even worse are the sites that have no contact info at all. I guess they’re a lost cause unless they read what I posted here.
Why am I obsessing over Google ranking? In truth, the Google ranking of Cerulean Sanctum itself is not that important to me from a “getting people to read what I write here” perspective. But a high ranking site in Google has other dividends that are very precious. It’s leveraging Cerulean Sanctum for future projects that’s critical for me. It didn’t start that way, though. It’s a little like having a child who turns out to be a musical prodigy. If you fail to encourage them in the arena of music, more is lost than just adding one more musician to the world. One day, this will be more clear. Have to leave it a bit hazy now.
So yeah, this is butt-numbing work, but it needs to be done. All I can say is that nothing I read online prepared me for this—that’s a word of warning to anyone trying to do the same thing. Moving a site to a new domain, a new Web host, and a new software package is a killer when summed. Any one of those is an issue in itself, but I saw no way to do this elegantly. That software hasn’t been invented yet, though I’m hoping that Apple will rescue others in the future by establishing the ne plus ultra of Web dev tools that will eliminate the kind of issues I’m going through now. To me, only Apple understands that being a gearhead isn’t its own reward and that some people just want stuff to work, leave the gearheading to the gearheads. I’m fairly high on the gearhead chart, but even I’m at a loss in much of this.
Now, for those other 319 links….
Drupal is where I’m at for a content management system and blog. Version 4.7 has just been released and I’m currently preparing to migrate, (my test site has been upgraded and runs well under 4.7).
Joomla seems pretty similar to Drupal in capabilities overall. I think you’d be happy having the site(s) under one software.
Tozer is great! Looking forward to your thoughts!
As someone who is struggling through creating an Access database for work (and who used FileMaker Pro back in the late 80′s) I feel your pain.
Another word on a good CMS – have you looked at Mambo? It’s free, and pretty easy to install, and to use. http://www.mamboserver.com/ take a look and see what you think.