RSSBook Review: It’s a Redesign!
June 28th, 2006 | View Comments
Like the new look? And the new backend?
To make a long story short, Google really, really, REALLY didn’t like the crazy URL scheme that pMachine had. Nonsensical query strings + different URLs for the same content = search engine disaster.
Plus I wanted to fix some of my wonky design choices from the old layout. Namely the 800×600 resolution unfriendliness as well as some less-than-ideal markup.
I had originally planned on upgrading my pMachine installation to Expression Engine because it could auto-map the old pMachine URLs to the more user-friendly URLs in EE, but that didn’t wind up happening.
I found the templating system in EE to be a nightmare compared to pMachine, and using Wordpress on my web design site had raised my expectations for flexibility and user-friendliness.
And when I discovered that EE has only partially fixed pMachine’s URL problems—the way it handles category pages still leaves something to desired—I opted to abandon the whole enterprise and move the whole kit and caboodle to Wordpress, complete with writing out every last redirect in my .htaccess file by hand.
I’ll also be slowly bringing over some content—book and movie reviews—from another site that I had that wasn’t getting much (ok, any) traffic, since the content fits well here. Look for it to pop up in the archives.
I may also be reviving some of the pre-pMachine entries (yes, I still have them all) and re-posting them. Going through them has been kind of a trip; most of that material is ancient history by pretty much any life metric.
In the meantime, please let me know if you discover any kinks in the redesign.
Yvonne posted this on June 28th, 2006 @ 1:07am in Blogging, Site Updates | Permalink to "It’s a Redesign!"
Discussion
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2. Yvonne » June 28th, 2006 at 2:18 am
Yeah, multiblogging would be nice, though having separate logins eliminates the possibility of accidently posting to the wrong blog, like I was prone to doing. I’ve got this blog and my knitting blog running out of the same database; Faces of Yve is on its own, but will get a roommate when I redo the fonts site.
I really love the theme-switching ability of Wordpress. So easy!
3. RATE OF ATTRITION » Blog Archive » Blogging Backend, Designs, and Links » June 28th, 2006 at 4:02 am
[…] Yvonne’s transitioned from pMachine to WordPress and redesigned her site. I switched from pMachine to WordPress about a year ago and never looked back. I’ve been tempted with other blogging backends, but other than the lack of multiblog functionality, WP has been the best blogging tool I’ve used so far. […]
1. Jane » June 28th, 2006 at 2:05 am
Switched to WordPress last year, never looked back, and never been happier with a blogging backend. I still use pmachine for a couple of sites (since I actually paid for a commercial license back when we had to pay for the pro version!) but honestly, wordpress works so much better and installs in a flash.
Only drawback is you can’t have multiple blogs using 1 login, although I’ve figured out how to do multiple installs using the same database.