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

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?

The new address is available at http://feeds.feedburner.com/tommcfarlin but the one you’ve mentioned also works fine, too.

Thanks!

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.