I remember the day I came up with the name for WordPress like it was yesterday. Photo Matt was incredibly excited about his new project (not surprising, if you know Matt – he is quite full of enthusiasm), but didn’t have a name yet. He told me he kept thinking about printing presses and how they helped get the word out to the common man. I brainstormed for part of an afternoon, and then it hit me. The URL was available, and I think I was screaming on Matt’s voice mail as I left him a message about it. He agreed that he like the name, and WordPress as we know it was born.
Once WP went public, he offered to convert my sites. Matter of fact, my huge blog data dump was used to help them with the MT import feature option. But I held out. Life was up in the air for me, things were really busy, and I just didn’t want to add learning a new CMS to the mix.
Now? Now I have WP envy. I visit WP blogs, and I realize that posting comments is so much faster. Then I watch over at ScriptyGoddess, and Jenn is focusing all of her time on WP hacks. New, sparkly, twinkly toys.
The final straw? I need to go through and seriously clean up my Blogrolls. They are a mess. I have sites listed that I never read, and sites that I read all the time aren’t listed. It’s a mess. It was then that I realized that it is silly to tweak my Blogroll (which may be slowing my site down) when I can convert to WP and manage the Blogroll internally!
I’ve hinted to Matt that I was probably ready for a change. Today I placed the call. Saturday afternoon at Chez Tremoulet we will become a WP family. (Mike was a part of the original dev team, although work pulled him away from it.) Hopefully, with my recently acquired free time, I can help WP write the instruction docs that they need, and I can help find interesting gadgets, tweaks and hacks for the other WP users. I have my new PHP 5 book here, so hopefully I can learn to write my own code. I could never do that with Perl.
This blog needs some changes. Things need to be shaken up. Hopefully, this will help not only me, but it will help you too. The pages will load faster, and commenting will be a breeze!
Have any WP feedback you want to share? Tips and tricks? Interesting things the world should know? (Ok, that was a loaded question, but I’ll leave it that way…)
19 replies on “I’m Switching Teams…”
even though i don’t use WP on chattykathy, i do use it on 3 other blogs (one of which, i will be consolidating into chattykathy soon)… but i do use WP with chattykathy in terms of the link manager system. i absolutely love it. i can add and delete quickly and everything sits with me and not on an external server. i’ve been tempted to start over with chattykathy with WP, but i’m so spoiled with pMachine’s multi-blog feature. maybe one day. on the other hand, i love WP. it’s so easy to do anything and everything!
Ooo, if you find any good tips/tricks sites, could you please pass them on?? I’m hopelessly lost in my new WP blog, since my host switched…
So far, I only know of things at Scripty. However, I might get in to writing up tips and tricks after I figure it all out. Send me your questions and I’ll work on answers in the next week or so!
Holy cow! I had no idea that you and matt were associated w/ Word Press! I live under a rock. I’m sure I read your post about it long ago and just forgot. My Mike is all over word press! He’s started experimenting with it and blogging with it (bare bones design right now) and he’s a REAL big fan of it! When I griped about the MT upgrade hooplah a while ago he said I should try wordpress. Neato that you named it! Neato that your friend made it! Oh, that’d be so awesome if Jenn got lots of scripts going for it. Too cool! Maybe I should consider switching! 😀
Oooh, you’ll have to tell us how it goes. You’ve got more entries than I do by a long shot.
I think we’re going to be lazy and stick to MT, but I’m still WP-curious.
Really? You’re switching? Sigh….
I started a journal with WP and this hack and I like it alot. It seems like this is the sort of thing MT should have implemented and I can’t figure out why. I’m very tempted to switch to one blog with different user levels so I don’t have to have 2 different sites but at the same time, it’s nice to be able to have multiple blogs on one installation.
I’m planning on starting a blog off blogspot next week and am looking at wordpress – after reading this I’m definitely more interested. I just have to figure out the details. I’m such a novice at html and stuff…
Congrats Christine. I’m happy with the move, myself. It’s a young tool, but it will be interesting to see it mature.
WP is also so much easier to tweak.
Tip: Add the per post moderation hack, and full screen post preview. And live comment preview.
I LOVE WordPress. It is my first try at using a content management system and it is so easy. All these years I’ve been doing all my entry coding by hand, now I don’t have to worry about it!
I can no longer get my rebuilds to rebuild my individual posts, so I’ve been thinking about this too. Of course, since we can bribe Matt, it’s a hell of a lot more tempting than doing it on our own. 😀
Thanks for posting about this. I installed WordPress today and it really did take 5 minutes or less! Wow!!!
I’ll be blogging again soon… well, I’m blogging again now, but on Xanga. Ack. 🙂
I’m glad you are switching, finally! 🙂 You will love the fact that nothing has to rebuild. I can do everything with WP that I used to do with MT 2 years ago, only faster and better!
Have a good weekend!
bribe Matt with food. he likes that. 🙂
Oh, I knew what bribe to go with. We’re making him lunch, and Sarah has been invited to join us.
Yippee! Another blog that I read that is converting to WP. I’ve been using it for a couple weeks now and even wrote a few plugins (simple ones). I love it. So much faster. I know you’re gonna love WP. Can’t wait to see what tips and tricks you’ll come up with. 🙂
::chants::
One of us… one of us.
I know you wanna spend all your spare time tweaking WP and writing plugins like Jenn and I have been doing. It’s almost funny how easy it is. I only really started learning PHP in January.
OOH! What’s the “Full post preview” that Shelley is talking about?!?! That’s one thing that kind of bothers me. I’d like to preview my posts before I publish them… Where?! Where is that hack?!!!
(And I’m curious about the “per post moderation” hack…whaz dat?)
Jennifer, I’ll put together a blurb on this tomorrow, and package the code, and then pull in the link to the individual moderated comment hack, and a few other odds and ends, and put it online in a post.