I’m currently having a good sort out of this blog – and will be relaunching it with quite a few changes in the near future.
I have found that running a self-hosted blog is a bit like running a PC, in that it gets clogged up with stuff that you install and then don’t use any more, you end up with files all over the place which aren’t very well managed, and then there is the look and feel of the thing, which I’ve never felt I have got just right.
You don’t need to worry about things going wobbly on the site though, as I am working on a local copy, running on my MacBook. This is through the joy of a brilliant little app called MAMP, which covers all the difficult stuff of getting Apache, PHP and MySQL running on the Mac.
With MAMP, all you have to do is download and install it, then start it up. It gives you instant and easy access to turning local servers on and off, creating and editing databases and all sorts. It really makes the whole process ridiculously easy.
For Windows users, there are equivalent apps like XAMPP, though not having used it I couldn’t vouch for how good it is!
So, for my local development of DavePress, I have locally installed a fresh WordPress 2.7.1, and then used the import function to pull in my posts and pages from the current version.
I did this rather than just import the whole database because there are tables in the current setup for plugins I no longer use, etc, and I want to keep things fresh where I can.
I’ve also installed the base theme I will be using, which will be Thesis, an extremely customisable theme which has had some great reviews from respected WordPress guys like Neville. I’ll be tweaking it to make it a bit more personal to me, and adding in plugins as I need them.
Another big job is to find all the images I have inserted into posts and make sure they are either a part of WordPress’ media manager or on Flickr. At the moment, files are all over the place: in different folders on the DavePress server, on Skitch, other image hosting services, on other websites where I have pinched them from… Having all photos on Flickr and other images inside my WordPress file structure will make managing my images and backing them up an awful lot easier.
Finally I want to take another look at the various static pages of content here – like About, Services, Resources etc – and give them a rewrite and make the whole site a bit more useful and professional.
This all means it may be a little while before I can relaunch this site, not least because it all has to be fitted round my proper work. Hopefully it will be worth it though!
On the PC front, WAMPServer gets my thumbs up for local development. Looking forward to seeing the relaunch – hoping to get into “proper” wordpress myself soon, albeit for work purposes…
Well I like the new look Dave, but not sure about the widgets bar being on the left – somehow my mind cant cope with it – but site looks good anyway…Is THesis easy to work with?
Simon – my wife agrees with you so I have swapped it round!
Thesis is really good, quite simple to make some changes, but if you want to you can really dig into it and get your hands dirty with custom hooks (whatever they are).
The other good thing about it is that it seems to work perfectly in any browser – which is really important for me as most of my readers are stuck with IE6 at work!