So I thought I would just grab the RSS from Friend Feed important it and do some minor manipulation on the data for what I wanted. But I was quite shocked to see that Friend Feed inserts display styles and HTML into their RSS feed which makes it very hard to parse and manipulate the data. The Friend Feed engineers are meant to be top Google people and it was quite surprising to me the way they mixed all the display syntax into a data sharing format. It basically makes the feed useless for any application other than having a Friend Feed like box on your site.

So now I am back to designing/coding/using WordPress modules to do it. Gina Trapani’s Twitalytic looks awesome, and I am thinking of looking over that code and seeing if it will work as a general aggregator with interesting stats to boot.

The amount of data Google Analytics let’s you track in an easy way is pretty amazing. You can see entrance and exit pages, which links on a page were clicked on and a whole host of other things. It’s a huge step up from the standard Webalizer I used to use, which basically just shows how many visitors you have.

Anyway, I was actually quite surprised how many people visit the site (apart from me debugging ) and just wanted say thanks for coming and I will try to post some more useful stuff soon.

I was also quite interested how many hits very old posts were getting. A lot of hits were going to “node/36″ which is a 404 now and linked to an old wallpaper I posted while playing around with Photoshop. It showed me how important old content can be when moving a site. If nothing else it can act as a gateway to get people into the rest of the site.

Just because I forgot about something I did a few years ago does not mean Google forgot about it. I just wish all the CMS systems will settle on a standard URL format so it would be easier to migrate to new systems and map old URLs onto you new system.

So I actually got a custom “Tweet This!” link on every post with one line of code in my template, and one simple module called Short Post URLS. Basically all I did was bought a new domain name that was as short as I could get (http://cmln.us) and mapped it onto my main domain. Now I can link to any post with the following url (http://cmln.us/p/1) where 1 is the post id. All stats and views should be recorded just like regular links to the post.

For general short links to external sites I am trying Short URL Plugin by Harley. So far I like that it is simple and does the job. But I have not had much chance to play with it yet, so I will have to test it a little more before commenting on how it works. In general though it maps external links onto http://cmln.us/u/1 where 1 is a unique id to the external link. This mod also tracks how many click-throughs there have been.

Extending

There are still some things I would like to add, like a bookmarklet that allows me to quickly create short-links. Also maybe a way to automatically create short-links for every link I create. Also I need to get an auto Tweet or Ping.fm plugin and have the shorturl embedded into my post announcements.

Also I would like the short-links to my posts to be automatically replaced with the longer version onces the user is forwarded. Right now the short domain just replaces my main domain. I am thinking that in the end I might just use the external link generator to create and track links to all links I make and not just external.

The Competition

After decided to move away from Drupal the first thing I did was try to figure out what it was I wanted to do. You could say I wrote a Specification Document for myself. I decided that I wanted the following things:

• A Blog – it is the main reason to have a personal site. A place to spout off.
• Multi-Media handling – ability to upload images mostly to create rich posts.
• Integration with Social websites (Twitter etc).
• Extensibility – the ability to customize the look and functionality of the site.
• Ease of use – it should be easy to maintain and post.

My first thought was SquareSpace, mostly due to all the ads I see on twit.tv and Revision3. Their free trial was great and really gave me a chance to play with the tools they offer and get a feel for it. It really is an amazing service, I had a really nice looking site up and running in no time. It’s very easy to post and modify the look. But my main problem with it was that you only get the modules they offer you, there is no option for digging into the code and doing something custom. Even the generated HTML seems to be set, with few options for customizing it. Everything is done through the WYSIWYG editor, and custom CSS.

Next I looked at Ruby on Rails, and after reading a lot about it and watching the screencasts I was into it. I was ready to try and code my blog from scratch and do everything myself. But the more I thought about it the more I realized that I really just want something to work right away, and play with making it better not making it work. My problem with Drupal was that I spent more time setting up, and making things work than I did actually posting stuff. I did not want to get into that again.

So while both SquareSpace and Rails are awesome they did not quite fit what I was looking for. SquareSpace is simple and easy to use, but lacks customization. Whereas Rails is the ultimate in customization but would require a lot of setup.

Welcome WordPress!

Actually I had always thought that WordPress was a hosted only blogging service, I had no idea that they offered an opensource package that you could install on your own host. Needless to say I was happy because WordPress seems to offer everything that I want.

The main advantage WordPress has over Drupal is that it knows what it wants to do. WordPress is blogging software, that’s it. Drupal’s goal is to do nearly everything you could want it to do, which is great but makes something harder for the user to do.

WordPress makes it easy to upload images, write posts, and manage it all in a clean and nice to look at interface. The raw PHP themes were a little hard to grasp, and I am still tweaking them, but they offer a lot of power. And via the Modules I can extend the functionality of the site if I need to.

Also, because of the higher profile of WordPress it is much easier to find pre-made modules, and other sites make sure they work with it.

But is it Good?

So far I am liking what I see, but I am far from an expert. The theme system took me a few hours to figure out what was going on, but after examining some other themes and playing around I got something working pretty quickly. Hopefully modules work just a well.

So with that I decided to give WordPress a try, and initial impressions are good. I have a blog up and running, and I am currently working on getting my old posts out of Drupal (much much harder than it should be) and importing into WordPress. I found a few tutorials for the move from Drupal, but most involve direct manupulation of the database, which in my eyes is a bad idea. So instead I am writing a small script that exports some basic Drupal post data into an XML file, then use the WordPress Import modules to import the data. So far it’s working well.

WordPress just seems much more focused on what I need right now, which is basically a blog. But it also seems to offer a lot of extensibility via modules and themes. I am about 60% of the way through creating a custom theme and it all seems quite well though out. Hopefully everything will be all back together by Monday. This will teach me to stop being lazy and just make a Linux server for testing next time, I was sure I could get everything upgraded in a day or two.

Anyway, I got a few database warnings when upgrading and the site is acting a little funky. I just cleared the site cache information and it seems to be working a little better. So hopefully that was it.

However I am considering clearing out all the info in the database and starting from scratch. I have over 1000 users and when I was looking at them 90% are spam users who must have got in before I disabled user accounts.

I will continue to post as I go so we can experience it together.

For example, the @ symbol is used to show that a Tweet is directed at a person. @veronica for example shows that your Tweet is directed at Veronica Belmont. The hash symbol (#) is used to signify Tags or important terms in your post. These conventions were not invented by Twitter, but they could still be useful in other situations.

The idea of giving my website a little extra context to the data I am submitted, and having it do interesting and powerful things is a really cool premise for me. For example, I currently have a “Tags” box right above this post I am writing. But as you can tell for my posts I rarely plan out what I am going to say, let alone write a list of keywords that describe the post. So this box is often filled with less than ideal meta data for my post.

It would be very nice to just put a hash tag in front of any terms I feel are important in the post and have the interpretor pull those tags out of the post. The tags could then be displayed differently, either with the hash or without, or a link to that tags filter.

Implementing the @ symbol would be a little more challenging, but would also be very fun. For example, @Slashdot could automatically pull a link to Slashdot.org from an internal lookup table. It could even try to determine the best kind of link. When using @veronica the interpretor could figure out that I mean veronica @ twitter.com.

Figuring out how to do all that if for another day, I am just mulling over ideas and flushing they out a little.

As part of the design I felt a little nostalgic and wanted to put a version number or founded on date on the new design. So I went to the Wayback Machine on the Internet Archive to view past versions of my site. It’s was really fun reading some of the old posts, what I thought was important then and the terrible design.

When you look back at things from several years ago you wonder if you will be looking at the stuff you are doing now and laughing at it ten years in the future.

The design is just a starting point right now, and the main thing I need to do is figure out how to get rails to do everything I want.

Revision3 and Twit.tv are two of my favorite sites to visit, and as any fan of those site will know they bombard you with SquareSpace ads. So know that I am looking into options I decided the give them a look first. After signing up for their free trial I was quite impressed with the WYSIWYG editing features. I quickly had a decent looking blog site up and running in a few hours.

The thing I like the most is just that they take care of all the little things for you, like layout CSS, blockquote formatting, and story entry. These little details always seem to end up taking the most time.

The post entry system is also nice.

But that was before I looked at my user list. My user list is packed with obvious bot names. And it seems like some of the users have visited a couple of times recently. So I know that if I enable comments again I will just be flooded with comment spam.

Seems like a new version of Drupal is coming out soon, so maybe I will upgrade to that and try some of the anti spam modules out there. Probably just one of those anti-bot images when user register will work out.

Another option would be to start a forum up again, but sometimes I find it depressing when I only get 1 post a week and it’s mine. So I will see what happens.