Programming Web Misc "/>

Housekeeping time

16 December 2011 at 10:13 am

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Back when I started this blog in 2006, I installed Movable Type and just left it there. Kind of scary given the amount of hackers, but apparently MT is pretty safe now that WordPress has taken over? I’ve finally managed to move this blog to a more recent CMS, so that was certainly about time… I didn’t want to spend time on a new setup, so I tried installing Wordpress - just because it takes virtually no time. It turned out that my hosting company had not yet upgraded their PHP to the version required by Wordpress, so I had to look at other options.

I love ExpressionEngine, but setting it up for something as simple as a blog is totally overkill. Then it dawned on me that the brilliant Bjørn Børresen had created some simple and decent looking EE templates over at ThemeForest. Turns out he has found some really good solutions, so if you just want a simple EE site - go check these out. They come complete with a bunch of Bjørn’s nifty extensions as well so the blog has Gravatar support, thumbnail generation and video embedding support. By just copying the theme files to the server at setup time, everything is set up for you automatically. Very neat!

Next part was moving all the contents of the old blog into EE and the excellent DataGrab module by Andrew Weaver came to the rescue. All my content (including comments) converted perfectly on the first attempt and all I’ve had to do are some very minor tweaks to the content and templates. Have to say that I didn’t expect this to go as smooth, so kudos to Bjørn and Andrew! I also threw together a quick, static site for my ltd company while I was at it.

Now that all my projects are finished for this year and I’m almost done with all other private projects, I will kick back with some Android and iPhone development on my brand new 27” monitor (I needed more pixels!). If you have any challenging Flash projects in January/February - please get in touch! I have extensive device experience and I wouldn’t mind doing some Stage 3D either…
(Note: the usual banners and microsites are not challenging/interesting…)