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Hell Yeah Bitch! .com is Rocking Disqus Comments Now

Posted on August 12, 2008 by Mike

Since moving my personal blog to WordPress, I’ve found that is (2.5-2.6) is the first release of WordPress or MovableType that I’ve been really happy with…except for the commenting system.  It was boring, and had really no features and was a bitch to edit or play with because of the crazy WordPress code (that and the whole freaking reason I’m using WordPress is because I want to come home and NOT have to code a blogging platform!).

Disqus has been an option for a while, but the fact they “trap” your comments didn’t sit well with me.  Today they released their big 2.0 version, and finally I’m on board!  The comments pass through to WordPress, and I also get all the fancy Disqus features, all with the ease of a WordPress plugin.

Note to the Disqus guys: I would have loved this for ToastedRav.com but I’ve already written my own system that I like a lot…however, if you get your API up and documented, I or more likely other big sites in our corporate group could take a hard look at you for sites that don’t revolve around comments like ToastedRav does.  You gotta get that API up though, so I can recreate this great WordPress functionality in our custom environment!

Note: ALL of the old comments are missing until they are exported fully into the Disqus system.  Suck.  Hopefully it will be done and they will all come back soon.

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The WordPress iPhone App Works

Posted on July 23, 2008 by Mike

I’m writing this post from my new iPhone 3G, and the transition from my old iPhone (now the ball and chain’s new iPhone).

I’m using the new WordPress app and it seems cool. Let’s see how the photo features work…

Hmm. Well I guess you will have to tell me if it really all works.

Tech Yourself Review on Toastedrav.com forthcoming.

photo

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Mike Finds a Problem With WordPress: Overwriting Htaccess Files

Posted on April 3, 2008 by Mike

So up until today, my switch to WordPress from Movable Type was pretty much all gumdrops and handjobs…that is, until my carefully crafted URL translator suddenly stopped working.  

Backstory: When I switched from MT to WP, I had to have my permalinks change.  That sucked, but I got them as close as possible to the old ones and I modified the .htaccess file WordPress had to redirect all old links to a php file that figured out what post they wanted and pushed them to the new link.  It took all of 20 minutes and I completed the switch.  However, somehow through my tinkering with WordPress over the past few days WordPress overwrote my modified .htaccess file.  Suck.  Luckily I was getting traffic from another blog today and I noticed they linked to an article that didn’t make much sense so I looked in to it and noticed that none of the old redirects were working.  Not cool.  To make matters work, my work site died for a short time today too, so its been a really buggy day and I didn’t need this. 

I just got it working again though, and this time backed up my .htaccess changes so I don’t have to rethink it all over again.  That all being said, I hate it when software like this expects that you don’t actually work with your files.  I know the minority of WordPress users don’t go digging around in their .htaccess file, but I think it is common enough that they should either:

  1. Notify you of the pending overwrite, or
  2. Have a smarter .htaccess creator that only replaces their lines and not the whole file.
…all in all, I’m still liking my move to WordPress, and this hit me on a bad day, but still…since this is the version that is downloaded and installed by users, maybe WordPress should think about its power-users just a little more.
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Hell Yeah Bitch! .com has moved to WordPress

Posted on March 30, 2008 by Mike

Hmmm, looks like the internet likes WordPress

Hell Yeah Bitch! .com turned 5 years old on 2.17.2008 and we have always been a Movable Type blog, but starting today, we are now running WordPress.  I’ve thought about moving to WordPress several times, but always decided not too for various reasons.  Last night though, after watching the video walkthrough for WordPress 2.5, I decided it was time to actually do it.

I have never been one of those guys that is 100% into a certain blogging platform (with the notable exception of my own blogging platform that run ToastedRav.com) but I stuck with Movable Type for a long time for reasons like the static pages keeping database hits down, and WordPress’ spaghetti code but both of those things don’t matter to me any more.  The Dreamhost database seems to be able to handle everyday time requests (though I still need to figure out a caching system for WordPress…any ideas?) and now with me working all day on my own blogging platform, I’ve found I like to just come home and blog on a stock system that doesn’t need to be hacked to my liking (though plugins help).  Not only that but some of the new features in WordPress 2.5 are going to be huge in making things simple enough for me that I will continue to make time for blogging on this site.  Like what?  Um, how about multiple file uploads that those spiffy gallery features for starters.

Like all moves, I’m sure I missed something.  Please let me know if you find anything breaking on your browser or if you noticed that I forgot to move something over from the old directory.

A few notes:

The permalinks had to change which sucks, but I did take the time tonight to write a little script and add a rewrite rule that will catch any old links and push the user to the same post under the new permalink.  Hopefully this will end up being a complete non-issue, but I did want to address it here.

I exported my MT blog and imported in to WordPress a few hours ago, so any comments posted in that time will be effectively gone.  Sorry.

 

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Textpattern, WordPress or stay with MovableType?

Posted on December 28, 2005 by Mike

Where are the posts?!

First off, get off my back! Secondly, I spent my day touching up the new design that I guess everyone likes because no one has said anything and playing (read: banging head against wall) with WordPress and Textpattern. Yeah, I’ve been thinking about switching away from movable type (the backend blogging software we use here at the site) again. Mainly because this site is just getting big enough, 700+ articles and 500+ comments, that the rebuilds are killing me and wordpress and textpattern don’t need to rebuild. I tried playing with the dynamic aspects of MovableType today too, but I wasn’t impressed.

So after wasting my day and getting frustrated with test installs, is HYB moving blogging software? Nope. Not now at least. Textpattern just wasn’t 100% what I’m looking for. I’m not sure why, but it just didn’t feel like it was what I needed. However, textpattern was closer to getting me to move than WordPress, everyone’s favorite. The major problem? WordPress’ MovableType importer in their 2.0 version sucks completely. It doesn’t import the comments correctly or update the number of comments for each article correctly (the “comments_count” field) and it doesn’t import any of my keywords at all. The last one isn’t a “bug” though…I looked in the code, they just ignore the keywords.

If wordpress would fix their importer, I might switch to them. I’m currently entertaining thoughts about just fixing the importer and moving, but I’m not sure if thats worth the trouble. MovableType is really fine, its just those damn rebuilds… Maybe I’ll take a peak and see what it would take to fix the importer.

Anyone know of someone who has already done this work? No? I didn’t think so. Anyone out there feel like convincing me to move to Textpattern or WordPress? Anyone have any thoughts on anything at all? Are you hungry?

Editor’s Note: Wow, I just read this post and it might be the most “bloggy” post I have ever put up there. Talk about a random thought stream. I promise some real content tomorrow.