Rotheblog – Version 1.5

This is my first post chronicaling my adventures with WordPress and converting a significantly sizable amount of content from a fairly static existing blog site into the formats and functionality provided by WordPress.

Why call it 1.5? Well, it isn’t really a redesign, but it is adding enough functionality and changing enough to be a major revision. You as a user may notice very little, but from my perspective a lot will change.

And why change it over at all? Man, you are full of why’s.

Well, first and foremost, I find it very important for my soul to have some sort of online journal about my life. It is fairly filtered, and at times more watered down than I want to be, but this is online we are talking about, and anyone can read anything I write.

Now, having said that, I was getting to the point where what I had setup wasn’t working anymore. Not in such a way that I couldn’t write, but there was one feature in particular that I wanted and was having problems figuring out how to work into my current site.

RSS. This is something that I have been curious about as of late. It has been out forever, but not until the last 4-5 months have I personally been searching out feeds and working on having the best, ever changing, portal page in Google. I also wanted to have the option of syndication for potential future business ventures, specifically if I do anything along the path of classic arcade games. I felt like the content I was working on, especially the reproduction of classic artwork was very unique and I should be able to share it with as many as possible.

After learning a litte bit more, and I finally got my head wrapped around what “trackbacks” were, and their purpose, I realize I might have an issue with my site the way it was for RSS. I would use a ton of my time to write them, or I could just take the leap and convert it all, and have them generated automatically for all sections of the site. Plus, I knew there were some other commenting systems I had in place before I transferred hosting on the site that I needed to get back online, why not do that all at once?

I also wasn’t able to find many blogs out there that were nice, and were all about Classic Arcade games. So at the very least, I will be able to just erase everything here and change the blog over to only arcades, or, I can port over that information to another site just for it.

The second reason was the structure. Like most web designers, I am always learning more and wanting to change things. I added fun ajax, dhtml, and javascript types features to my site, added new pages, and rearranged things. It was also the first site I ever did in CSS. But even though I planned it really well, it still got to be a mess. A mess to manage, and in terms of the stylesheet, a mess means way too big of a file that increases loading time.

So, in short, I wanted to convert it over for future flexibility. WordPress is such a cool online application that has a great user base and lots of documentation. The developers have done a great job in everything, and I wanted to play and participate.

I hope to learn alot like I did when I developed the blog first time around, and use this in my technology arsenal for future personal growth.

Long story, but true, and that is why version 1.5 of Rotheblog.

Now….like when I moved personal stuff off of Rothecreations here, I am toying of starting my own site just for my Illustration. It kind of depends on how great WordPress really is.

Here are some similar arcade posts

• Ning vs. Klov Round 1 – Usernames
• Rotheblog (2.5) arcade design launched!
• Moving a WordPress website
• Help writing posts for this arcade blog
• New WordPress install? First thing to do, setup permalinking!

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