toxicsoftware.com

If you’re viewing this entry in a browser you’ll have noticed a new look for toxicsoftware.com. Not satisfied with just changing the look I’ve switched weblog software from Expression Engine to WordPress. And to complete the trifecta I’ve changed hosts from Loopshot to Dreamhost.

I am sure there will be some problems during this change-over. For example right now my public source code repository at http://toxic-public.googlecode.com/ is missing. I’ll be transferring the dump as soon as I can. Also not working, search panel from any non blog page, missing images from blog postings and a plethora of “hello world” place holders sprinkled throughout the site.

The new look for the site was created by Fernando Lucas of devixdesign.com. I think Fernando did a great job making the theme suitably toxic. After receiving the art, stylesheets and HTML I manually converted the HTML into a WordPress theme (I might even make a Sandvox theme out of it)

I switched CMS’s from Expression Engine to WordPress for several reasons. EE does a poor job of integrating with a traditional web-site, making it very hard (practically impossible) for me to mix static pages and dynamic content. By removing this limitation I hope to fix a lot of the things I’ve been really hating about my blog (like how hard it is to find anything!). WP also has many more useful plug-ins than EE, which should come in handy when trying to defeat spam and integrate other software like Mint. EE is commercial software and actually charges extra to download newer versions of the software you’ve already bought, I find this gouging to be rather distasteful. Switching from EE to MT was not easy and involved ssh-tunnels to mysql servers and two Python scripts that used SQLObject to export the data from EE into an XML file and then import that data into WP. I also have several mod_rewrite directives that redirect old EE style URLs to the new WP links. I might blog about the process (and put the scripts online to help other people move over) in another posting.

Finally I switched hosts from Loopshot to Dreamhost simply because I could host multiple domains from a single Dreamhost account. I had already set up Ironcoder.org on Dreamhost and was impressed with Dreamhost’s ability to host and manage multiple domains. Loopshot is a great web-host if you need personal attention, its owner Eric Jennings is a great web developer, a very capable (and accommodating) server administrator and an all round good person and great friend.

And hopefully if you’re viewing this post in an RSS reader you’ll be wondering what the heck I am waffling on about.