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Flailing Wildly
Too much straw, not enough camel.

Welcome to WordPress!

by Ryan Parman • August 31, 2005 • Website • 6 comments

Welcome to WordPress! This is my first posting on my new system, and it feels good to know that most of the hard part is over. I’ve decided to rename my blog “Flailing Wildly” because I think it fits me pretty well, and it sounds better than “Skyzyx.com”. I’m also wanting to move to something more professional sounding that covers any domain name I may want to have, so “Skyzyx.com” is now officially “Skyzyx Technologies”.

For those who don’t know, I started working on my website’s redesign about a year and a half ago. After several months of development, my hard drive fried, and I lost nearly everything. This was rather discouraging, and as such I didn’t get around to beginning development fresh until April-ish of this year. I got WordPress installed (I love the 5 minute install), exported the then-current entries, and imported everything into WordPress… no problems.

A huge part of this redesign is an overhaul of the information architecture. This site has grown far beyond what I had initially anticipated, and I was still using 2 year old IA. So, I began organizing my categories as much as possible, and placing posts in multiple categories, where appropriate. About 2 months ago, I started getting 500 errors in Movable Type. This had less to do with Movable Type, and more to do with a bug in the latest release of CPanel, which is what my other webhost uses (for now… I’m switching hosts for .com this month). Anyways, I couldn’t login anymore, which meant that I couldn’t export my posts from Movable Type anymore.

So last night I had an epiphany. Log onto my .com server, backup my Movable Type database, install Movable Type on my .net server, import the database backup, and use the MT interface to do a formal export, which I then imported back into WordPress. The whole thing took about 15 minutes to accomplish, after spending the last two months frustrated over the whole thing.

Anyways, I’m moving Skyzyx.com to the same host that I have Skyzyx.net at: Dreamhost. Dreamhost is freakin’ awesome, and that’s all I have to say about that. Anyways, all of the content that is currently at Skyzyx.com will still exist once my dual-site strategy goes live. Skyzyx.com will be the home of all things professional: my resume, projects like SimplePie and Tarzan that could almost be considered “Products”, and things like Web Building Resources and such. Things that are a little more static, and don’t need to be updated as often. Skyzyx.net will be more personal and experimental in nature. This is where my weblog will live, along with experimental software, CVS repositories, etc. This is the plan today, anyways. Or I might simply have any address at Skyzyx.com redirect to the same files Skyzyx.net, or vice versa.

Anyways, I’m back. I was never dead, I was just trying to balance fixing my website, caring for my new son, and figuring out how to develop JSTL-based, Ajax-enabled portlets for Oracle Portal (at work). Things are coming along. Expect lots and lots and lots of changes while I get used to this WordPress thing, figure out how to build my own design, and generally get this forever-old redesign out and ready to go.

Ryan Parman

Ryan Parman is an entrepreneur, open source evangelist and passionate usability advocate currently living in Seattle. He is the founder and visionary behind SimplePie and CloudFusion, co-founder of WarpShare, member of the RSS Advisory Board, and is currently with Amazon. Ryan's aptly-named blog, Flailing Wildly, is where he writes about ideas longer than 140 characters.

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Discussion

Willmot

September 1, 2005

Even though it may not be my place to say so, welcome to WordPress World. I love it and I hope you will to, I look forward to you casting your considerable skills under its hood as I am sure you are already doing.

I am sure no one will mind me saying that its good to have you back after such a long silence, although even this posed a blessing in disguise, as it meant I delved deeper into your site and found a rich selection of resources, which kept me up deep into the night.

Look forward to following both you and the sites progress in the coming future.

David House

September 3, 2005

Awesome! Glad to see you’re putting pen to paper again. Keep us informed with your plans :)

Oh, and by the way, a request for the new site: simplify your sidebar menu! There are far too many options for the mere mortal.

Ryan Parman

September 3, 2005

Improved information architechture is my number 1 goal for the new site. I’m also going to try to do some usability testing for it too, so we’ll see what I can come up with. :)

Ken Villines

September 4, 2005

I am glad to see you making the move to WP! I have been using FeedWordPress (WP Plugin) that is gr8 for pulling RSS from anywhere on the web. I have actually made a lot of enhancements to the plugin in the last month. I can’t get in touch with the developer so I am forced to release a Pro version without his blessing. It obviously will remane GPL.

I have always followed your site and this seems like it might be useful to you. If you want to test it out before I post it feel free to email me.

-Ken Villines

Josh Heyer

September 20, 2005

It’s nice to hear you there and have some plans to continue to grow. It’s important to continue to grow outside of the confines of the workplace. I’m finding that I haven’t touched any of my domains for quite sometime and I need to get back into it all. Honestly I haven’t even been checking the usual blogs or been involved much in the community. I feel like I need to and it seems like you already are.

Btw, enjoy wordpress! I really like it. I’m thinking of using it for some client sites as a mini-content management system. I have to do a little more research but I think it should work well.

Anyway, glad to see your back!

kartooner

September 26, 2005

Welcome back Ryan :)

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All ideas, opinions and comments I post are my own and are in no way affiliated with anybody I work with. If you quote and/or reprint something I've written or said, please direct folks back to this site as a form of attribution. I promise I'll do the same for you. Unless otherwise noted, all content on this site is copyright © 1979–2010 Ryan Parman. Powered by Rocket Sauce.