Welcome to the new & improved escapevelocity!

Whew! The migration from Blogger to Wordpress, and subsequent site redesign, is finally complete.  There are still a few loose ends that need fixing, but otherwise escapevelocity is back in business. 

escapevelocity is now powered by Wordpress 2.0.1.  WP uses PHP and MySQL, which took me quite a few days to figure out.  I’m still fumbling my way through the code, but I’m slowly getting the hang of it.  This is probably the biggest difference between Blogger and WP - with Blogger, I hardly tinkered with the backend files because everything was set up through the website interface.  The admin interface for Wordpress is pretty awesome, very intuitive and has far more options than the Blogger interface. Overall, Wordpress offers much more freedom and control over blog setup than Blogger.  But my favorite thing about Wordpress is that it operates under a public license, meaning there isn’t any one person or company that owns Wordpress.  The code is publically available, and anyone in the world can program new enhancements, plugins, etc.  Plus, it’s 100% free. 

Wordpress 2.0.1 (not sure about earlier versions) has a nifty tool for importing content from other blogging tools into Wordpress.  This worked relatively OK for me, though some posts lost their formatting in the transfer.  For example, my Marathon race report is completely screwed up and I might have to reapply the formatting from scratch. 

An overview of other changes:

• View escapevelocity in English or Korean.  Use the “Translate” links in the sidebar.
• Calendar of posts.  Dates with posts are highlighted in orange.  On mouseover, you can view the titles of the posts for that day.  This calendar plugin was written by Jon Abad, who lives here in HTown.
• Post categories.  With Wordpress, I can organize posts into categories, or “Adventures.”  You can view all the posts in a certain category by clicking on the category title.
• “Abbreviated” posts.  Longer posts are “split” so that the first few introductory paragraphs are on the frontpage.  This keeps the mainpage from being a really looooong document.  Click the “Read the full post” to, uh, read the full post. 
• My Flickr gallery.  I need to add more photos, but I’ve reached the upload limit for the month. 

I still have to fix some loose ends and make other final changes:

• I still have to assign categories to 141 posts. 
• The links need to be cleaned up and reorganized a little.
• Need to update the “About Me” page.

Apologies in advance for any bugs that may pop up as I get settled into the worlds of PHP and CSS coding.   I’m loving it, though!