Deliberations

My blog has a new motor. But you wouldn’t guess it by looking at it (click on the link if you are reading this in Facebook or in a feed aggregator). It looks and feels the same as before.

With Google Blogger terminating their publish-by-FTP feature, I had to shift my blog. I chose Textpattern because it looked simple enough, yet does what I need it to do. It’s been around a few years, is open sourced, with a small but loyal following. WordPress was an option, but I couldn’t see how to avoid redesigning my site. Not because I think my blog looks too wonderful, not. But I don’t have time for customising something new. I just wanted to shift it over as quickly as possible. And that’s what Textpattern let me do. Perfectly.

The template with its underlying substitution tokens and functions transferred over completely, albeit split into a different arrangement. The style sheet hasn’t changed a bit. The biggest challenge was in keeping the URL scheme for posts. If you are on my site, you will see that the URL of this post looks to be an html file. But Textpattern is entirely database-driven! So some fancy work was done to make the URL a virtual one. Similarly, I’ve kept the old RSS feed url, even though Textpattern uses a different link method. All of the posts imported seamlessly.

So far, I have nothing but praise for the Textpattern system. I hope it works for you as well as it does for me!

Published under a Creative Commons License

Posted by Ron Lubensky on 11 February 2010 at 04:24 PM | Link