Month: July 2011

The Move to WordPress.com

I switched this site to WordPress.com last weekend — it had been self-hosted since 2005, on Dreamhost.

Things went very smoothly — I followed instructions in the WordPress.com Support documentation and in various dashboard screens, and they were very helpful. I especially was impressed with the Google verification steps and how easy it was to add MX records for my Google Apps integration.

Probably the most annoying thing was waiting for propagation after updating nameservers, but there’s not a lot I could have done about that anyway.

A few hiccups:

  • Old email subscribers: I had to email my old list to ask them to subscribe again on WordPress.com (I was using FeedBlitz before).
  • Link importing: I had to split up the OPML file to import with categories, otherwise I’d have a flat import with no categories.
  • I used Textile on my old blog, so I had to run a small PHP script to update the content in posts/pages to plain old HTML.

The plugins I’m going to miss the most are:

Continue reading The Move to WordPress.com

WordPress 3.2, Gershwin

Last night I shared about the latest and greatest WordPress release at the July 2011 Tucson WordPress meetup.

The focus for the 3.2 release was making WordPress faster and lighter. Highlights include a new distraction-free writing mode, a completely refreshed admin UI, faster updates (only updating files that changed), support dropped for IE6, PHP 4, and MySQL 4, and the new default theme, Twenty Eleven.

Go update now! (3.2.1 is out now, by the way, with some minor fixes.)

Here are the links I mentioned in my talk.

The next Tucson WordPress meetup is scheduled for September 7th, 2011. Mark your calendars, and see you there.

Thanks to Andy Nacin for allowing me to use his slides from WordCamp Columbus as a starting point for my talk.

Break Your Theme, WordCamp Columbus

I gave a talk called Break Your Theme in June 2011, in Columbus (Ohio, USA) for WordCamp Columbus 2011. I had a blast! The room was packed and I had great questions after my talk and in the hallways later.

Packed house! (Photo by Ryan Imel, WPCandy.)

Here are the slides and notes from the talk.

By the way, Ryan Imel of WPCandy did an awesome job of live-blogging WordCamp Columbus 2011.