Blog

The blog is a Blog

Previously this was a blog only in intent and content. Now it is all that and more, as I’ve implemented a WordPress publishing platform to run this section of the site.

I did consider building my own blogging system, which would have guaranteed maximum flexibility in presentation and functionality, but at the significant cost of delaying implementation and distracting me from the marketing tasks at hand. Having sold an ad, I’m hooked, and I want more, but I feel I need to be careful in how I go about the whole marketing and promotion process, which means I can’t spend all my time writing code.

I did some research on the blogging tools available on my web host, Movable Type and WordPress, by directly looking for opinions of one vs the other. I googled the matchup, found some lame writing, and finally found this post by Dustin Diaz, which was informative and to the point. Most of the (coherent) opinions I found on the web were in favor of WordPress, and I was inclined to go that way myself, but the real clincher was that I found out WordPress is in PHP, while Movable Type is in Perl. Since the rest of this site is in PHP, and I needed to fully integrate blog pages into the site (or, more technically correct, is that I needed to integrate certain site structures, such as the Skyline, into every blog page) there was really only one choice – WordPress.

As you can see, I have managed to tweak the WP templates to pretty much follow the layout and style convention of the rest of the site. This took some doing, actually, since the author of the theme I selected as a starting point likes to place start and end tag pairs across template files (which makes for great fun troubleshooting the HTML structure), and the default XHTML doctype declaration gave me all sorts of grief until I decided to replace it with my tried and true HTML declaration. All in all, though, I am very happy with my ability to bend this system to my will, and it sure beat doing it all myself!