I know I have not posted here in about two weeks, so lets change all that. There are about 42 different things I could update you on. Many of them less than entirely pleasant. Some of my plans have changed for the future and some of those changes were not my idea. However, when doors close windows open. On that front I thought I might tell you about my plans for jaredrbyer.com

I have done some experimenting with potential upgrades for next year. I looked at different blogging software. My ISP on my current plan gives me 10 MySQL databases to play with. On top of that I have to FTP in to upload software and make changes. On top of that I have time limited access to the internet. So my solution was to install the awesome MAMP software. MAMP lets you run and easily control Apache, MySQL and PHP on your mac. I understand you can do most of this with out the software, but that would be over my head. In the old days of strait up html editing you could hit save and F5. However, these days blog software runs on databases and PHP, so you need the extra horse power.

First up was to look to at which blog platform I wanted to go forward with. Currently I am running two different softwares, one for this blog (wordpress) and one for the photo of the day (pixelpost). First up this blog, for the text blog I looked at three different options. The first was my tried and true Wordpress. The next option is still technically wordpress but with a twist, Wordpress MU . The last contender was the newly opened sourced Movable Type.

Wordpress has a couple of things going for it, the first being that I am already familiar with it. All my existing plug ins work with it as well as a new plug in I plan to implement to connect all the pages together in a new way. The downside is that each wordpress installation by default takes up one MySQL database (I only have 10). There is a way to make multiple installations of WP run from one database. However, that kind of tweaking I want to avoid at this time if I can.

The next choice, Wordpress MU (Pronounced Mew like the science symbol or pronounce the letters individually M – U) overcomes the multiple MySQL database limit. MU is designed to host thousands of wordpress blogs from a single installation. Because MU shares a huge amount of code with WP I should be able to navigate my way around it. The limitations are of course that some plug ins might not work correctly. The plug in I mentioned above though was actually designed with MU in mind. My database limits though are not currently a problem so the the small added benefit when compared to learning something a little new doesn’t actually pan out.

Movable Type is a powerful blog engine. Sights such as Lifehacker.com run on MT and run well. However, I ran into problems setting MT up under MAMP. There are work arounds, like there always are, however if I have to spend two to five minutes tweaking MAMP I would have to spend hours getting it to work on my host. So MT was out before it really started to play. I might still get it running on MAMP, but for now it is out of the race.

The winner of the first round is good old Wordpress. The next round was for the photoblog. Do I remove it from pixelpost and move it over to wordpress using the powerful Yet Another PhotoBlog plug in. I have recently had some headaches with pixelpost and comments have been disabled for over a month there. I was leaning towards WP and YAPB but hit a couple of glitches. There is really as far as I can find only one strong fleshed out YAPB ready template. Pixelpost on the other hand, even if you have never heard of it, has a handful of amazing templates. I found one that fits in with the current style but ads a good deal of polish. Comments will be fixed in time for the relaunch though.

So what is in store for the January 1st updates (hopefully)? Well those are surprises right now. You do know however that I plan on adding a new plug in to link the sight together better, new theme for the photoblog. There will also probably be a new blog theme coming up. I am also beta testing a hi-res version of the photo of the day. The image size I am testing right now is a maximum of 1200×800, that would be compared to the regular one at 750×500 maximum size. The high res would currently only serve a small percentage of my visitors. I think the existing 750×500 looks great on my 1280×800 screen and the majority of my visitors (around 80%) use either 1280×1024 or 1024×768 screen resolutions. That means that the hi-res will currently be a low priority but I am hoping to integrate it and launch it next year.

Tags: Software