Territorial Bloggings

Well, I’ve gone and done it. Territorial Bloggings has been moved over to WordPress.com, after 5.5 years of running my own instance of WordPress on a general web hosting service.

Why the change?

Well, three main reasons: 1) WP.com’s feature set is now close enough to on-par with the self-hosted/”full”/.org version that it’s not a sacrifice to make the change (the last time I checked, a year or so ago, that wasn’t the case…), as a result, 2) It’s simpler & easier to keep things running when I don’t have to worry about security, patches, upgrades, etc… I’ve gotten to a point where I just don’t have the time or the inclination to do the “sysadmin” hobby at that level anymore, and 3) It’s cheaper, as I won’t have to worry about re-upping with the hosting provider.

I’m still working out some of the kinks, which is taking a bit longer than in the past, mainly because of a lack of time to dedicate to things like squaring away RSS feeds and the like; but, at least I have the DNS all switched over, along with having successfully migrated all of the content. Now I just need to write new content…

I’ll get right on that.

-ghp

Just dropped in two new plugins, along with the WordPress 2.8.1 update: one to push new post notifications out into the Twitter-stream, and one to facilitate/enable folks to login using their Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, OpenID, Google, or Yahoo accounts when they want to post comments.

It’s not so much that I’m against anonymous comments (although I do prefer names to be associated with opinions), it’s more that I think it’s a pretty cool plugin because it allows accounts/userids/passwords that folks already have to be leveraged in another place/way. We’ll see how it works out…

-ghp

The first posting in way too long, it’s about using Jott post to WordPress by talking rather than typing, not too shabby.
listen

Powered by Jott

WP 2.7 is out — setting it up to enable posting from my Blackberry via Twitter…

Just a quick note to let you know that there have been some big changes here at Territorial Bloggings (and that similar changes are coming for Katie’s Beer (the other member of the newly renamed/rebranded piperblogs.org web-publishing family), as soon as TK gets a little more comfortable with her migration…)

Not only have I changed the theme, but the impending arrival of WordPress 2.7 got me to re-evaluate my hosting requirements, such that I’ve changed hosts (moving from Precision Effect to Eleven2), rolled out two new domains, implemented the latest Release Candidate of WP 2.7, and done it pretty darned quick (as these things usually go, anyway…).

Why? Well, that’s going to be the subject of upcoming posts.

-ghp

This is pretty cool – I found a plugin (WPhone) for WordPress that enables me to pretty much run my entire blog from my BlackBerry handheld device! From writing posts (like this one) to doing simple admin stuff, it’s pretty darned nifty, if you ask me. It might even loosen me up a little & get me posting more without getting quite so hung up on precise verbiage…

-ghp

I just installed a new comment management/aggregation app/tool/thing – Disqus.

It got pretty good reviews over at WebWare’s recent Battle of the comment add-ons, so I figured I’d give it a try. One of the niftier things about it is the community aspect of it. From the Disqus FAQ page:

Disqus, pronounced discuss, is a service for blog comments. Disqus enables bloggers to make the conversations on their blogs more interactive and manageable. Our distributed comment system connects readers across blog communities, while empowering publishers in promoting their content.

In short, using Disqus is a better way for people to participate in conversations initially started by blog posts.

Largely, I’m writing this post so that there’ll be a post for which the new commenting system will be in place — the old, WordPress comment system is still in effect for posts that already have existing comments.

Hopefully it’ll be transparent, easy to use, and bring some value (to me, if no one else) to the party.

If you have any thoughts on it, let me know.

-ghp

Well, I’ve jumped in & done the upgrade to the newest version of WordPress. Version 2.5 came out about a week ago, but I haven’t had the time to get to the upgrade, what with all the testing & checking for updated themes & plugins, until today.

Those who visit the site directly will notice a new theme has been installed. Not because I was necessarily dissatisfied with the old one, but more because I like to change things up every so often, and picking a new theme that was 2.5 ‘compliant’ seemed as good a reason as any.

I think that I was able to test things out enough to ensure that nothing is broken, but it’s almost a certainty that something will have slipped through the cracks. So, if you run into anything that doesn’t work right, please let me know by dropping me an email or just clicking on the ‘Contact’ link near the top of the page.

-ghp

It seems that bigsis didn’t like the more austere look that I’ve had, theme-wise, for the past week or so.

Of course, you know, that means that I had to make a change (love ya, bigsis! ;^) ).

I think that I’ve got something that looks pretty cool, and is reasonably functional to boot. I particularly like the “featured article/posting” function, along with the general look-&-feel design work that the theme author put into it.

Theme design is something that is a bit of a bugaboo for me, as I know what I want on a certain level, and I know when I don’t have it, but I’m nowhere near patient enough to design the silly stuff myself. That’s generally why I get some wanderlust every so often & feel compelled to move the virtual furniture around a bit.

And each time I hope/think that I’ve finally gotten it “right”…

Hopefully, this time I have! ;^)

-ghp

Some various junk & stuff…

• Archive pruning – the pruning of the Territorial Archive is done. I winnowed things down from about 950 posts to 515, and from about 600 comments down to 275. The comments were deleted as a function of the posts that I deleted. The posts were more purposeful, as I got rid of some that just didn’t make sense anymore, some that pointed to blogs that are no longer available, and others that I just didn’t think warranted keeping around for “historical” reasons. Plus, it helped make my database quite a bit smaller & more manageable…
• Tagging – all of the remaining posts are now fully tagged. It might not provide all that much actual value, but it makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something. And it can give a potentially interesting view of just what I’ve been writing about over the past three years.
• Blogging software – despite how much I seem to want to stop using WordPress, I just can’t seem to ever make it happen. I was even to the point where I was willing to write-off all of my old posts & not worry about trying to get them imported into a/the new blogging system. There’s a part of me that’s just tired of WordPress, and wants to try something new. That part, however, is quickly overwhelmed by the part of me that just likes to keep things simple, understandable, and useful. WordPress, for all it’s faults, is an amazing combination of easy & robust. Plus, I know it & how it works, and there’s something to be said for the comfort that comes from the inertia of the installed base. I’ve even gone ahead and installed the latest version of WordPress – 2.3. I can’t say that I won’t feel the wanderlust again anytime soon, ’cause I know that I will. I’ll check out what’s going on out there with all the other blogging/cms apps. And someday there might even be one that gets me to switch.

I was going to write more, but I think that I’ll stop there. For now.

-ghp