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.

Recently, WordPress 2.5 was released and its corresponding minor bug-fix release, version 2.5.1, was released as well. This was a relatively solid upgrade. The overhaul of the interface was a welcome change; however, the upgrade ended up causing some major problems with its RSS syndication.

First off, there was some under-the-hood changes that changed how users access RSS feeds based on how the permalinks are configured. For example, if you’re using permalinks in the format of /year/date/day/title, then you should use the RSS format of /feed/rss.

Secondly, the upgrade actually broke RSS2 feeds. You can read an entire forum post about it here on the WordPress forum. This was quickly addressed and the bug fix is available in this changeset. In my opinion, these are the types of bugs that should’ve been found during testing of such a major release - I don’t get why something like this wasn’t caught.

Lastly, I was burned twice on the RSS issue. Once I patched my installation with the bug fix that I just mentioned, I noticed that my RSS2, ATOM, and RDF feeds still weren’t working. I ended up tracking it down to a problem with failing to encode an ampersand. Specifically, the author’s ‘friendly name’ included an ampersand and it was written into the database without being encoded - parsers do not like the ampersand if it isn’t encoded as it’s usually used as a delimiter for key/value pairs. Because of this, the XML used in publishing the feed was invalid.

Once I made this modification in the database, all of the feeds went live again. Just like the WordPress developers should have caught their RSS issue before releasing, I should have caught that issue when configuring the site.

Yesterday, I got my invitation to try out Dropbox. As of now, there are clients available for Windows and Mac. According to the forums, the team is working on a client for Linux. You’re given 2gb of storage, and several invitations to pass out to friends.

I’ve got a few invitations remaining, so let me know if you’d like one. In the coming week or so, I’ll try to post my thoughts on the service.

Recently, I purchased an LG Voyager. Since my previous phone was a smart phone, I did a massive amount of reading and debating before purchasing the Voyager - I actually wanted to downgrade my phone, but not lose a lot of functionality that I was used to having. The Voyager is not a smart phone, but it has a lot of features that allow me to maintain the same features, which is what I want, and it does so for less than half the cost. After using it for a few weeks and finding that I do not miss my smart phone at all, I figured I’d share my thoughts of my experience with some of the features of the Voyager that allow me to maintain all of the same functionality as a smart phone (for much cheaper).

A note about Outlook and Google services
It’s important to note that if you’re looking to know if the Voyager will sync with Microsoft Outlook for email and calendar, then this review is not going to cover that topic. I sync everything with Google services and Google provides a lot of functionality that makes it easy to push their services to cell phones via SMS. I also want to add that the Voyager comes with a full HTML browser so it is possible to check your Outlook email via the web interface, but that’s not the focus of this post.

What I wanted out of a phone
As previously mentioned, aside from making calls and sending/receiving text messages, I want my phone to provide access to my email, my calendar, and to have the functionality that will allow me to casually browse the internet to, say, read my RSS feeds. In addition to access to these services, I’d like my phone to ping me when I’ve received a new email and whenever I’ve got a calendar event about to occur.

Additionally, as much as I love having the full QWERTY keyboard, I found that I actually missed sending quick text messages using the numeric keypad. Smart phones are wide enough such that it basically requires two hands to type any type of message and that frustrated me at times. Luckily, the Voyager has both.

Lastly, I ended up disliking Windows Mobile - I probably should have seen that coming, but either way, I digress as that isn’t the point of this post. Basically, I wanted to “de-grade” to a dumb phone from a smart phone in order to save money, but maintain smart phone functionality all the while.

HTML Browser
The first thing I want to point out is the quality of the browser on the LG Voyager. It’s a full HTML browser (versus the usual WAP browser found on most dumb phones), so, excluding things such as JavaScript, the phone renders pages almost exactly the same as you’d see on your desktop. Matched with the speed of the Verizon EV-DO network, you get a really solid browsing experience. The browser was one of the selling points of the phone for me - with this browser, the touch screen, and the EV-DO network, I have web access to almost all of the usual pages that I use. Most major sites also have mobile version available, such as YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, and Google, if the standard version doesn’t load.

Getting Email
Because I maintain everything using my Gmail account (with the exception of work email), I had been syncing my previous phone’s email client using IMAP with Gmail. This proved to be nice, but, seeing as how I’m at a computer most of the day, the benefits of IMAP weren’t as strong as I could basically just respond to the email from my machine. The phone ended up, more often than not, notifying me of whenever I had received a new email. In the rare case that I wasn’t near a computer, it was nice to be able to send an email from my phone.

Since the Voyager is not a smart phone, it has no true email client that most phones like the Treo or the Blackjack have; however, Gmail offers the ability to automatically forward emails as they are received. Since you can send a text message to any phone on the Verizon network at [phone-number]–>

Obviously, this doesn’t allow me to respond to an email, and the email is truncated because of space limitations of cell phones, but it provides notification that I do have an email so I can respond whenever I get back to a computer, or I can open up the browser on the phone to respond if I absolutely need to respond at that time.

Calendar Notifications
The second major point that I want out of my phone is the ability to have my schedule available with me, and to have the ability to add, remove, and update items on the go. With my previous phone, I was able to do this; however, I’d then have to run the synchronization application in order to have both calendars updated. With Google Calendar, I can keep all of my data centralized, and, by using Google Calendar sync, I can sync my work calendar with my Google Calendar automatically.

Similarly with email, I’ve setup SMS calendar notifications to be sent to my phone 15 minutes prior to an event starting. This works much in the same way that Outlook notifies me on my desktop at work, and also the way that Windows Mobile’s calendar works. If I need to see a more detailed schedule, I can again launch the browser to view and/or modify my events without having to initiate a syncing process.

Miscellaneous
The phone also has other good features, but the primary thing I wanted to show was the ability of using the Voyager as a smart phone though it lacks features that most smart phones have. In addition, Verizon’s BroadbandAccess plan for smart phones cost $50 a month whereas dumb phones have unlimited web access for $15 month. With this phone, I’ve been able to save money without losing any features of a smart phone.

Until later,
Tom

With sites like YouTube and flickr providing a seemingly endless amount of storage, it’s becoming increasingly easier to find places to backup all of your various media. I personally don’t use many of these services either because I don’t agree with their privacy policy, their price, or their vague details of how my information is kept secure.

I have no reason to believe that Dropbox will do anything different in these areas, but if this service goes above my expectations and has a really good price tag, then I’m sold on it. I don’t wanna get my hopes up, but I’d be lying if I said I weren’t a little excited about it.