Well, its is finally done: the transition to WordPress is complete. Getting WordPress installed and running on my test site was a snap, and moving the posts was easy (since I only had about 20 of them to move, I basically just copied from phpMyAdmin and pased into WordPress). The most difficult part by far was getting my WordPress site to look like my original.

To make it “easy” for developers to build WordPress-powered sites, the WordPress team implemented a bunch of PHP functions to add specific items to a page. For example, to insert a post’s title, you’d just insert
< ?php the_title(); ?>
into your page and at runtime WordPress would replace that with the title of a post. Unfortunately, my original site was built to utilize PHP Application Tools’ patTemplate. patTemplate allows you to totally separate page design from backend code, but with the way the WordPress functions work, the two tools don’t play nice together. I could have hacked the hell out of WordPress to get what I wanted, but I’m not ready for that yet and I wanted to get the site running sooner rather than later. So I ended up reworking the template files into a format that WordPress liked and I’m finally happy with the result.

That minor setup headache aside, I think I’m going to like running WordPress. First, the posting interface is 110 times better than the one I had written before. Second, the bookmarklet that I’ve added to my browsers’ link bars will make it easy for me to make posts whenever I come across interesting things as I’m surfing (read: the site might get posted to more than twice a year now). Third, I have working comments features (so please post some!). I also like the ping features of WordPress–whenever I post something a ping about the post is sent to several blog directories, which in turn add links back to my post and hopefully will bring new visitors to my site. It seems nerdy, but posting has become strangly addictive now.

The next steps for the site are to improve on some of the CSS settngs and to build in my photo gallery. I plan to keep my digital camera on me more often now too, since lately I’ve been missing a lot of great “Kodak Moments,” and as I snap pictures, I’d like to share them with my fans. I also plan to redo the links page to pull links from WordPress (since it has very nice link management features) and update my personal info, adding my resume and whatnot.

So welcome to Kodiak’s Korner. I’m glad you found “my little place on the net.” Feel free to stay as long as you’d like and please come back often.