Change Is In The Air
Posted by David | Filed under Technology
I am overhauling the entire process of weblogging here at Talkabout. The biggest change is the switch from Typepad to a locally-hosted installation of Wordpress, but there’s a lot running under the hood. You can read the full story below for a detailed rundown on what’s been changed and why. I should have done this a long time ago, honestly, and saved myself the cash, but to be honest I was just being lazy and letting Six Apart do all the dirty work.
Making the Switch
Typepad has treated me wonderfully and the only reason I chose not to switch until now has been its sheer ease-of-use; simply put, the benefit of having the nitty-gritty done for me outweighed its monthly cost.
However, my webhost recently began offering one-click installations of Wordpress, and the temptation to try it out was simply too great. I’d never used Wordpress before, but I knew it was very popular with plenty of plugins and options for customization. It even had the ability to import posts from both Typepad and Blogger, the latter being the first system this site ever utilized and still having archives never made available after the switch to Typepad.
Also, this year marked my return to university study, meaning less money to spend on fancy gizmos like Typepad.
One click later, a new (and very bland) version of Talkabout was running on my own server, complete with every single post ever made over the past 4 years.
Tweaking the Appearance
I am toying with the idea of directly porting my Typepad design to this blog, but to be honest there’s a lot I don’t like about it. I could, of course, come up with an entirely new design, but the two most likely options are either revising the current look or reverting back to the original Talkabout layout from its Blogger days, which I still love. Or maybe I’ll just add a CSS style switcher and let you guys choose.
For the actual entries, Wordpress comes with a set of preinstalled formatting tools for posts that keep the code clean and standards-compliant. I chose to activate Markdown#[Markdown], and also installed Bö#[Bo] just to be cool.
Bringing iPhoto into Play
Photography is supposed to be a very important part of this site, but with the most recent design update I virtually removed the simplicity of updating featured photos, and thus lost interest in keeping them updated. Enter Photon#[Photon], a wonderful plugin that allows me to export directly from iPhoto to Wordpress. I simply take a photo, plug my camera into my laptop (which automatically opens iPhoto and imports any new pictures), select the photos I want to feature, and hit Export. Voila!
Well, it turns out this is easier said than done. The first few times I tried exporting a photo, I kept getting “Server Error 803.” After poking around every setting relating to my host, weblog, iPhoto, etc. I finally worked out a solution as follows:
- Install JR and Adraan’s XML-RPC Patch for Wordpress 1.2
- Allow file uploads in Wordpress (Options > Miscellaneous)
- Specify a destination directory (chmodded 755) in Wordpress, not Photon
- Ensure the author used by Photon is allowed to upload in Wordpress (Users > Level)
Now everything works smoothly, and my photos can be viewed and commented on, for better or worse, in the Photography section. In the future I’ll organize and format them to look a whole lot better, a’la Doug Bowman.
Updating on the Client Side
Over the course of getting Photon to work properly, I stumbled upon Ecto, a great little app that lets me update Talkabout without logging into Wordpress’ web-based interface. There’s a ton of customization and formatting options, plus the ability to manage multiple weblogs, all for $17.95, less than two months at Typepad. Incidentally, the XML-RPC patch has some additional fixes for Ecto.
[Markdown]: A text formatting plugin by John Gruber that turns regular text into valid XHTML
[Bo]: JR’s special preformatter for Markdown that generates footnotes, like this one.
[Photon]: A mac plugin that exports pictures from iPhoto to the weblog of your choice
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