drzy

After many years of using Greymatter to update my posts, I finally got to the true point of diminishing returns on my ubiquitous laziness.

As you can see, the site has totally been redone. It is now using Wordpress. I didn’t start off wanting to change the site over to a whole new skeleton, but things progressed that way quickly. What started the cascade into total site change was a simple desire for the Google search on the old site to actual search the archives. It would pull keywords from the current main page just fine, but even though the archives were almost fully indexed, it would never find anything from searches that have definite content in the archives.

After many months of putting up with it (laziness), a few days ago I tried to track down why this was happening. How else? by Google searching for an answer. As usual, most of the info I gathered were from post excerpts on random forums. It turns out this happens to a lot of people, and that’s why Google recently started a beta of sitemap submissions.

Having just discovered the Google sitemaps and the corresponding Google Webmaster site, I excitedly set out to create a sitemap for drzy and submitted it to Google. Other posts from the Google search I did earlier then caught my eye, especially one’s about the Google crawler. Unfortunately, I did not bookmark it, but one particular site had documented and tracked what the Google crawler did on his site, and how the crawler responded to changes. One of the things he was surprised at was how voraciously it scurried over RSS files and their links. This spurred me to finally develop an RSS for drzy.

I never caught the RSS bug, I still don’t use them much, but if Google would more actively index my site through one, then I was damn sure going to start one. But then laziness reared it’s ugly head… I wanted something automated and integrated into Greymatter, my posting skeleton.

Greymatter used to have a very active community, but as the original creator stopped supporting it, the community slowly died off. Plug-ins and extra scripts and mods dried up. The latest popular working script to automatically generate RSS for Greymatter sites was last updated in 2004. And right at the top of the page describing it, they recommended converting Greymatter into Wordpress. Now, I have friends that use Wordpress and love it, but laziness had me firmly held by the old standby of Greymatter. More on this later… (Man! this post is long!)

So, after ignoring the warning about Greymatter being too old for it’s own good, I tried for two days to install the script to create RSS on the fly. Two days of back and forths with my website provider, and me installing module after module in Perl. And in the end, when i finally got it working, it turns out that the script reads page indexes and not just page cgi files like it indicated. I had stopped generating indexes in 2002, and I was already fed up.

I decided to look into Wordpress. Well, I decided to look into anything, but the fact that the source of the RSS script had a link to a conversion from Greymatter to Wordpress in one easy script had me leaning towards it. I decided to try and play around with other site skeletons. I had no intention of changing the site over at all, and certainly not within one day.

After ruling out Drupal (for now) because it didn’t have an easy way to import Greymatter archives, I installed Wordpress. I thought the PHPBB install was easy… Wordpress was literally a one minute install. All you have to do is upload, unpack, and tell it what your database settings are. After that it ran like a charm… I didn’t even have to chmod anything.

That impressed me, but even more impressive is how easy it is to modify, and how much content there is. I started out testing themes I like, and for a few hours I delved into the PHP, CSS, Javascript and such and tweaked it out to how I want it. I realized after I took a break from playing with it, that the site already had a better layout, a working search, updating RSS, and linked to everything I wanted. There is really no reason that I could see not to just change everything over. The import from Greymatter went perfectly. The only thing that was annoying was that it seemed to strip out any “embed” tags, so videos from Youtube and Google Video got stripped from their posts (I’m still in the process of restoring those).

So, long story long, the site is converted, the archives are all there, and by the time you read this, this will be the main page. (Of course, if it doesn’t work, no one will ever see this post )