[This will be the first post following me as I upgrade ChrisWelch.com. What follows will be an overview of the project, and later posts will describe the various steps along the way.]
As I mentioned in my previous article, I wanted to start experimenting with WordPress 1.5, a blogging product. Having built 90% of this site by hand, my needs were quickly outpacing my ability build features to support them. After a fair amount of research, I narrowed my choices down to WordPress and MovableType, both running best on Linux platforms. WordPress seems to be a great mix of flexible customization, robust features, and ease-of-use. Although it only supports one blog per site at the moment, I'm sure multiple blog support is in the works. MovableType, although supporting almost all of the features I wanted, can be pricey for the Basic (US$69.99) and Unlimited (US$99.99) versions, whereas WordPress is free.
After reading up on WordPress, I've also decided the whole site needs a bit of a touchup. I'm a little bored with the monochromatic color scheme, so I think I'm going to spice the design up a bit (kick it up a notch, if you will). I'm also going to improve the photo albums, enhance my calendar, improve navigation, et al. And with WordPress, there will be a whole slew of new blog features such as TrackBacks, PingBacks, RSS Feeds, Comment Moderation, Categories, Archives, Posting via E-mail, etc.... It's all very exciting!
My goal in this redesign is to code as little as possible and just integrate as many features as I can using only the best free or almost free software out there. I want to see if I can build a highly managable site without killing myself, or my wallet.
After choosing blog software, the most important thing a person can do who wants to setup a site for themself is find a competant, reasonably priced hosting company to store your website. I can easily and highly recommend 1&1 hosting. 1&1 is one of the largest hosting companies out there. That means although you may not expect 100% of the personal support you'll get from a small company, you can expect really good FAQs, great documentation, and better features for the same or less money.
The Business Linux plan that I just signed up for offers for US$10/mn the ability to host up to 150 web sites (100 registered domains/50 subdomains), a virtually unlimited number of e-mail accounts (with 1GB mailboxes each), a 100MB database, etc. Plus they feature either PHP4/PHP5/Perl/MySQL (Linux) or ASP/ASP.NET/SQL/Access (Microsoft).
I was trying to figure out what took me so long to start implementing a real blogging system, and I guess it all comes down to wanting to do it all myself. Now that I've suffered the cuts and bruises of DIY, and learning how a blogging system works, I can finally move past myself and start building off of someone else's work.
Anywho... I was looking at some other WordPress driven sites and I'll leave you with a few blogs to browse...
- http://9rules.com/
- http://www.chrisjdavis.org/
- http://aphotolog.com/
- http://chrism.us/photos/
- http://phonophunk.phreakin.com/news/