As time goes by, I can honestly say I do not regret one bit my decision to move over from Movable Type. WordPress has made content management so easy it's almost a crime I don't post new material more often.

Originally Published on March 28, 2009

I joined the US Army Reserves back in 2005. This makes manually creating HTML impractical in the extreme since I may not always have access to the internet, and when I do get access, it may not be on my own machine, or for very long. Understand this concept: When you are in the Army, your ass belongs to the Army, and they don’t really give a flying-fart about your silly internet based hobbies.

So to save time and increase reliability I decided I needed some kind of content management system. There are several options available such as Blogger, but I wanted one where I can use my own domain, and completely control it on my own server. This whittles it down to two major contenders: WordPress and Movable Type.

I just installed WordPress as of yesterday. It’s of little wonder why I had not done it before. Much like any content management program, the learning curve was pretty steep.

Now before you start flaming me for being an idiot when it comes to this sort of thing, keep in mind that I am quite comfortable with building my own PC’s. Never having trusted pre-installed operating systems, I have personally installed and used every OS that Microsoft has released since before MS DOS 5.0. I was exclusively using Linux from 2002 up until 2008 and even ran my own webserver (Xitami) from my basement prior to my military enlistment. In short, I think I know what the heck I’m doing when I sit behind a keyboard.

Having said that, I will confess that I do not know much when it comes to actual programming. It’s not the concept… That part I get. It’s the individualized grammer and syntax that every freakin language out there wants to inflict on the poor user.

But I digress…

Installing a content management system seems to require MySQL and some kind of black magic. After promising my firstborn male to The Dark One, Movable Type was up and running. Since I don’t plan on ever having children, this wasn’t really that steep of a commitment. Oh the rapture I felt within my heart to see a website that I own suddenly awaken with dynamic content! It was a moment that left me tingling all over.

The honeymoon was cut short when I realized there were a couple of ugly bugs. For one, the “Search” function was broken. Using the search would cause the system to barf some incomprehensible crap, and of course it would not even have the courtesy to redirect or link back to my site. No, instead it just left the visitor staring at a screen full of “Can’t locate” excuses.

Let’s face it though: Who’s gonna use the search function on my site anyways? So it wasn’t that big of a deal to me. It wasn’t even that disturbing when I realized that the backup function told me I should download and delete the file in my /tmp directory only to realize that THERE WAS NO /tmp DIRECTORY!

What did turn out to be a big deal was the part where my most recent post just disappeared from the front page.  This was a problem. This was a big-ass problem. As of right now I’m only planning on putting up one joke and panel per week… if that! I can’t have a content management system expire my pages that it thinks are too old for the front page.

So I went back to The Dark One and sacrificed my gonads. Still not a great loss to me since I had not used them in years, and has the added benefit of completely nullifying the prior contract to successfully install Movable Type. This time, the object was to bring forth the powers of WordPress on my domain.

For some reason MT relies on perl, but WP relies on PHP (which relies on perl). Don’t let it prejudice you. The PHP scripts have a very smooth feel compared to perl by itself. Of course both rely upon that MySQL stuff which is basically the backend to a retarded spreadsheet harbouring delusions of grandeur.

Now don’t forget, I originally self-hosted from home, but after I joined the Army the self-server concept was doomed. Realizing I couldn’t just let Flush Twice or any of my other domains just die, I found a hosting provider to take over. It felt weird at first, but IX Webhosting (a non-solicited plug) has made the whole experience very comfortable and rewarding. At first they didn’t offer that MySQL thing, and the rest of the service was pretty gosh darned “barebones” at that. Over the years, they’ve expanded, and their $3.95 per month plan (charged as $50 per year) has grown to a really great value for their customers. I’m not a shill, but a genuinely satisfied customer. When you call their customer support, be courteous and polite, and I guarentee they will bend over backwards to help you solve your problems. (Be an ass and I hope they hand you yours.)

So on to this “WordPress”… In comaparison to MT, it’s much smoother. Installing themes is super easy. Download, unzip, FTP upload to your ../themes directory and refresh. There are more themes available, but they all pretty much look alike. Once you figure out how to install it, it really is a much more pleasant experience.

There is one giant caveat to these content management systems:

YOU DON’T GET WHAT YOU DON’T PAY FOR.

Namely, customer support.

Go into the forums and no matter how politely a person has phrased their inquiry the response is terse at best, and almost never descriptive enough to solve your problem.

For instance: One person wanted to know how to reverse the chronological order. Her response? To insert a line of arbitrary looking PHP before “The Loop”, and that was ALL.

WTF is “the loop”? Google is my friend and explains it a little, but I was never actually able to locate the loop on my particular installation of WP. I saw a number of sites telling me how to find it on previous releases, but apparently no one is telling where the new top secret location of the loop is on WP 2.7.1 just yet. (Leave a comment for me if you know.)

So there you have it. The latest version of Movable Type craps out over a missing comma, and WordPress isn’t giving up any configuration secrets. I suspect it’s probably easier to hack either of them than the password on an Apple ][e disk, and from the looks of it, I’ll probably get swamped with more spam in my comments than an open MySpace page.

{sigh}

So let’s just throw caution to the wind and pray that WP is what this site needs to stay up and running, and occasionally receive an update now and then. I’ve got an upcoming deployment, and I’ve got to get my priorities in order… If FlushTwice goes down the shitter while I’m gone… Well… It’s down the shitter till I get back.

And no matter what… I will be back.

Actually, I'm not even sure what this actually means. I just put it here as a filler. I think the whole idea of a soldier going out to shop for shoes sounds funny for some reason, but I can assure you that shopping for the best footware is very important to anyone who has to be on their feet over long hours.

Update January 29, 2010

As you can see, I’m still using WordPress, and while I never actually made it to my deployment due to a medical issue, I’m very much alive and well.

If you’re still trying to decide whether or not you want Movable Type or WordPress, let me just say that WordPress has only gotten easier to use since I first installed it.

Today, updates are as simple as a few mouse clicks. It’s all automatic, and there’s never any muss or fuss with having to download to my computer followed by an upload to my server. It just handles it directly. The same is true for plug-ins as well. It really is brain-dead simple.

In closing, my endorsement for WordPress couldn’t be stronger. Installation is even easier now, and while I haven’t written a tutorial yet on my secret recipe, I’ve installed it from scratch on more than a few occasions, and I must admit, it’s shamefully trivial so long as you have MySQL and PHP available on your web server.

If I find time later on, I’ll write a quick “How to” on the subject… But that’s later. Much later.

-f2x