from Drupal to WordPress

As a guy with a good bit of Drupal experience, and a limited amount of WordPress experience, I’ve thought about writing up a little comparison & contrast essay for my blog. I just found this post from a guy who has a lot of Drupal experience, and is just getting into WordPress. I agree with most of what he’s saying here, and have definitely noticed some of the same stuff that he has. So now I guess I don’t have to write up that comparison/contrast post!

One note though: since I started using WordPress, I’ve been keeping an eye out for something similar to drush, the command-line tool for Drupal. Well, I stumbled across it today: WP-CLI. I’m not sure if it does quite as much as drush, and I’m also not sure if I’ll be able to get it working on my web host, but it looks useful.

too much to do this weekend

I just figured out that both AnimeNEXT and WordCamp Philly are happening this weekend. I kind of like the idea of checking out a WordPress gathering, and the Philly WordCamp would be relatively convenient. And I haven’t been to an anime convention in a few years, so it would be cool to drop in on AnimeNEXT and check it out. Maybe I can drive to Philly on Saturday and drop in on AnimeNEXT on Sunday? Of course, I need to fit my laundry and grocery shopping in there too somehow.

SSL is working

So my SSL cert came through (after about 12 hours, instead of the expected 4). I’ve added:
define('FORCE_SSL_ADMIN', true);
to my wp-config.php, and it seems to be working. I think it’ll be OK to have the whole admin under SSL and not just the login; SSL doesn’t seem to have slowed down the admin interface.

I realized also that I should make sure the WordPress iOS app will connect with SSL. According to the FAQ, it does, though I don’t know if I have any good way of checking that.

Beginning COBOL for Programmers

Holy cow, somebody actually published a new book on COBOL this year. I haven’t touched COBOL in years, and I don’t plan on touching it again any time soon. But I guess I shouldn’t laugh too much at the idea that COBOL skills are still relevant.

SSL for WordPress

After reading a little about Reset The Net, I got to thinking that it might not be a bad idea to order an SSL certificate for this site, and put, at least, the admin stuff behind SSL. (I never really thought about it much with Blogger, but of course the blogger.com admin interface was always behind SSL.)

So I went ahead and ordered a cert from my host, 1&1. They charge $30 for the first year, and $50 per year after that. So it’s not the best price, but it’s not horrible. It looks like I don’t need to do anything special to set it up, just click a few buttons and wait (then click a few more buttons).

For WordPress, I will likely try this plugin to manage what’s behind SSL and what’s not. Or maybe I should read this page at wordpress.org.

WordPress themes and Amazon links

Anyone reading this blog is probably tired of me posting about WordPress by now, but I wanted to write a quick follow-up post on my new theme. My base theme is Stargazer, from Theme Hybrid. I’m using a fairly simple child theme of my own creation, that tweaks just a few things from the main theme.

One thing I’ve been doing is going back through the old posts that I imported from Blogger, and trying to clean up any display issues. The first thing I addressed was the display of program code, which I think is looking reasonably good now. That required just a bit of tweaking in the child theme, and a switchover to using the Gist shortcode provided by Jetpack.

I also found that pretty much anything that I had embedded from any other site was getting messed up. I cleared up most of those problems using other shortcodes. So now, YouTube videos and SoundCloud embeds are looking reasonable. (And, as a side project, I replaced some dead video links with working ones.) In the case of some fairly oddball embeds, I just removed them entirely. Some were pointing to dead web sites, and others just weren’t worth bothering with.

The last big nut to crack was all the Amazon Associates links that I had scattered through the blog. Those were using iframes, and they weren’t displaying quite right. I messed with this myself for awhile, but eventually gave up.

The Stargazer theme is free and open source, but you can get support for it by signing up for the author’s “club”. Just this week, he dropped the price for a one-year membership from $29 to $10, so I went ahead and signed up, then posted about my issue in the forums. Well, I got a fix from him within 24 hours, I copied it up to my blog, and it’s working great. So, thanks to Justin for being awesome. If you’re in the market for a free WordPress theme, definitely give Theme Hybrid a look.

By the way, I’ve never made any money at all from any of the Amazon Associates links I have on this blog. But I like the look of the little product widgets, so I’m going to keep using them. (I stuck a fairly random one at the top of this post, for no particular reason.)