Site Overhaul - Moving from Chyrp to WordPress
I’ve spent part of this weekend overhauling my site. This was driven by the need for greater organization of content, and better support for visitors. Here’s a quick rundown of what I’ve done to improve the site…
Moved from Chyrp to WordPress
Importing all of my previous content into WordPress from Chyrp was a little more tedious than I was hoping, but it wasn’t terrible. If you’re planning to move from Chyrp to WordPress, here are my recommendations (because I know there are those of you out there that have done it):
- Backup your database and files first.
- Export your current RSS feed to a file on your local machine. To do this, simply load up the site in Firefox and choose “File>Save Page As…” and select “Web Page, XHTML Only.”
- Install WordPress.
- From the WordPress dashboard, select ‘Manage’, ‘Import’, and select ‘RSS.’ Use the file that you saved in Step 2.
If everything goes correctly, WordPress should list all of the posts that you’ve just imported and generate a success message. Before you’re done with this step, you may want to browse the site and examine your posts - importing from XML can sometimes result in some odd behavior (as a result of how WordPress’ editor and browsers parse CDATA tags differently). Your content is all there, you just may have to clean up some of the residual tags. You can do this by editing a given post in HTML mode.
Built a customized theme
At this point, I’m more concerned with publishing content than building a custom theme, so I met myself in the middle: I found a theme called Simplicity that I really liked, but it still lacked a few things that I wanted. I spent some time tweaking various aspects of the theme and organizing it in such a way that it was conducive to how I’m wanting to organize all of my information.
Because of the amount of modification that I made to the Simplicity theme, I ended up saving it as its own theme. It’s currently not publicly available, but if you’re interested in using it, leave me a comment.
Updated FeedBurner
Chyrp and WordPress each publish separate feeds. Luckily, I had been using FeedBurner prior to migrating to WordPress, so I was able to update the feed from withing the FeedBurner dashboard. This should take care of current subscribers all the while allowing me to maintain stats with no real loss of data.
Unfortunately, this may result in a few readers displaying information differently. For instance, Google Reader displays the RSS 2.0 feed differently than Firefox’s Live Bookmarks. Additionally, some readers may show a lot of my previous posts as new posts.
Installed the latest version of Google Analytics
During my time of using Google Analytics, they released a new version that I never actually used on my old platform. This is nothing more than sheer laziness, but it’s given me the change to incorporate the new version into this site.
Overall, this migration was a relatively painless process. Hopefully content publishing will be much easier, comments will be managed more efficiently, and overall visitor experience will be better.
13. May 2008 at 21:15
I had been wondering what you had been up to since I hadn’t received any updates from you recently in my reader. Now I know…. your changes made the link for your feed in my Google Reader not work.
I was using http://feeds.feedburner.com/tomfoolery/ but it hasn’t updated since your previous posts.
I reloaded your site into Google Reader and now it uses http://www.tommcfarlin.com/feed/ and works just fine.
Just giving you a heads-up.
13. May 2008 at 21:23
Yeah, whenever I updated my site I changed the FeedBurner URL.
The new address is available at http://feeds.feedburner.com/tommcfarlin but the one you’ve mentioned also works fine, too.
Thanks!
14. May 2008 at 00:10
Tom, two questions -
I’ve been shopping around for my first blogging platform, and Chyrp seemed by far the most appealing. Why did you move to Wordpress?
Also, I’ve been looking for a technique that would simulate the very smooth and subtle gradient, in your case gray, for my own design. How exactly did you produce that effect?
14. May 2008 at 07:01
Hey Garrett,
Your first question is more of one that is based on what your looking for out of your blogging platform.
For me, WordPress works better because I find that it’s easier to manage various content throughout the site. I not only wanted to be able to blog but I also wanted the ability setup different pages for things such as projects. I also like the way the WordPress manages its themes and other content a bit more than Chyrp - though it’s tedious regardless of what system you use, I found that customizing my own theme in WordPress was better. In my opinion, WordPress’ file organization is better. Lastly, the community surrounding WordPress is significantly larger than that of Chyrp. You have a plethora of themes, plug-ins, and other users that are available for help or to be helped. Currently, that’s something that Chyrp doesn’t have.
Chyrp was a nice system and I have nothing against it. I think that it’s got huge potential, and that its highly conducive to blogging at this point. It even has a small set of plug-ins that make it easy to tumblelog; however, if you’re looking for something to easily manage a variety of additional content in addition to blog posts, then WordPress does a good job of that.
Remember that it all boils down to a matter of preference and there’s no real right or wrong system - it’s whatever works best for you.
Secondly, the gradient background is a small 5px x 106px gradient image. Using CSS, I’ve set it as the site’s background image and set white as the site’s background color. I then set a style that forces the background image to stay fixed so, whenever the page is scrolled, the background stays in the same location - the top of the viewport.
Let me know where you end up setting up the blog, and with which system you end up going with.
I’ll be interested to follow along!
Tom