You may have noticed a slight change in the way things look around here. That’s because I’m migrating the blog, finally, to a blog maintainance system… WordPress. When I moved the site to Winters Web Works (webmaster/host for Tom Tomorrow’s This Modern World), Jonah, the admin here, coaxed me into it. For the past several months he’s been letting me experiment with a mirror WordPress blog and I’ve grown to like it, and in particular, the convenience of not having to manually do every little thing, like update the archive file and keep the permalinks and the comment links correct. It’s a very nice system, and one that should allow me to post from any computer with an Internet connection and a browser, so now I won’t have to carry my entire web site with me everywhere I go on a flash stick.

I’ve got a nice rich text editor I can compose my posts in (provided the browser I’m using follows the standard document model) and a spell checker (very necessary) and I can cut and paste links and text and format everything much more easily then editing the HTML by hand. I can also work on a post and save it without publishing, to work on it later, even from another location if need be.

There’s a new comment engine built right in to WordPress, which I’ll be using from now on. But Jonah has migrated the old comments over (which is why some of the old posts have duplicate comment links in them now). If you have any trouble with the new comment engine let me know. My blog should be RSS Feed enabled now, and better integrated with Technorati’s blog update notification system. Hopefully that will make things easier on the readers here who’ve asked me about it.

There may still be some dust to setting after the change over. If you notice anything amiss let me know. But I think the blog looks really nice now. Jonah made some suggestions about the banner image and the overall layout that I think work really well, and I’m very happy with how things look now. And since it’s a lot easier for me to just sit down and drop in a post I’ll probably be posting a tad more often now. I’m pretty sure this will end up being one of those "Why didn’t I do this before" kinda things…