I’ve been talking about it for what seems like forever. Over the past week, I finally started to make the jump. If you’re reading this entry, the DNS changes have propagated to your neck of the woods, which means you’re getting the new version of this site. The title of this post is a phrase former colleagues at Lycos used when we were redesigning a site or changing the backend while the site continued to function live on a public server. A task which seemed impossible, but had to be done.
Take note that the conversion is not yet complete. I’m normally a person who likes to have everything polished and final before presenting it to the world. But this time, I decided to go ahead and change the DNS records to point to the new site, and let you see the customization, conversions, and fixes as they happen.
What’s different? First of all, an entirely new hosting service with servers running Apache under FreeBSD UNIX. This is a big change for me because of my former heavy reliance on ASP and Microsoft’s IIS web server. This new site represents my commitment to shifting over to PHP, MySQL, and other open-source tools. Although I like getting under the hood and into the technical details, I’m a designer, not a developer by nature. So the switch is a little cumbersome for me. Even without a programming background, fortunately, PHP shares a lot of similar concepts with ASP. So at least I already understand the concepts behind simple if statements, for loops, and string concatenation.
The next big change is a jump over to Movable Type to power this log, and eventually, multiple portions of this site. I’ve documented some of my frustrations with Blogger in the past. It was (and still is) a great tool to launch someone into blogging. But the instability of Blogger servers and the application itself got to me after multiple instances of disappearing archives, transfer errors, and service outages (like the one yesterday which forced me to create and archive my HotBot entry manually). I was using lots of ASP to circumvent the restrictive features of Blogger, create both monthly and daily archives, and format dates and timestamps to my liking.
After writing sporadic entries for the past 10 months, I wanted more features for this site, including the ability for readers to add their own comments, categorized entries, a working RSS feed, and permalinks to each entry rather than to a day’s worth of entries. Some of these features could have been shoe-horned into Blogger-generated content, but not entirely to my satisfaction or with my limitations in programming knowledge. Movable Type adds all of these features for me automatically. It also eliminates the need for most of my old ASP workarounds which existed solely to spit out content the way I wanted it. Now, any manipulations will be tackled with PHP. As I’ve said, I’m not a programmer, so I’m learning much this stuff for the first time as I go.
Have patience with me. Expect the code base, features, and style sheets to be changing frequently over the next few days. Pieces of the site may not be formatted correctly yet. They may not even function properly. My entire portfolio will be offline until I figure out how to shift it over to a MySQL database and rewrite all the dynamic pages using PHP. My contact form will not work until I change the processing to use sendmail. And I need to find a way to automatically redirect all the old archive requests (/log/default.asp?id=xxxxxxxx) to point to the new MT-generated PHP files. Once I get the underlying technology more stable and have it generating all pages as it’s supposed to, I may begin to work in some design changes, and let that be a public process as well.
Have advice about MT or PHP for me? Requests? Feedback? Comments are now open in most of these entries, so come on in. Make your self at home.
Posted in MovableType, Personal, Site, Technology
23 comments (Comments closed)
First post - ever! heh :P
Jokes aside, Congrats on your serverchange/backendchange/featuregains. I’m really looking forward to seeing your design changes, as your site has been a big inspiration and point-of-admiration for me.
Oliver Kofoed Pedersen
oliver-at|sign-oliverkofoed.com
I’ll be following with close interest. I’ve been considering the same jump myself for months, and now the Zen Garden is running Apache/PHP, I’ve at least had a chance to dabble. Same problem though: not much of a coder, but with enough Googling and bashing my head against the wall I can usually do enough to get by.
MT is really good for customization. The syntax doesn’t take much to get used to, and combined with a bit of creative scripting you can get really specific about your formatting. I (heart) MT.
Very interesing and above all a great way to learn a few new things. Thanks for sharing your experiences with this sites changes and tweaks. Being a desinger I’m especially looking forward to your redesign efforts in the future. Good luck on the migration process!
I have been working on something similar. My site snowsuit.net runs off a custom publishing utility I built with php and mysql. I am certainly not a programmer, but my utility seems to work pretty well (so far).
Im not really sure how MT works, but it seems that you could eliminate the need for MT by using php and Mysql. Because no matter how you slice it, youre just typing entries into a textarea.
thankfully with an install of MT, you don’t need to know much PHP. if you’re familiar with ASP tho, PHP is just some slightly different syntax for the most part, and works easy as pie with mysql. mmm….pie.
let me know if you need some help with the redirects.
went through it a few months ago, it was fun and it worked really nice using a custom 404 and a PHP script.
Using a bit of Apache’s mod_rewrite and you won’t even need to use a custom 404, you can do it all automatically (either transparently transfer or just redirect the response).
I’m only part-way through the customization of MT so far, and I’ve gotta say, MT’s flexibility and ease of use kicks tail. Combine all the template tags with a little scripting and my rudimentary knowledge of PHP, and it’s *so* much easier to achieve the same things (and more) that used to take so much ASP code just to make possible with Blogger-generated content. And I’m probably only using 20% of the tags or less so far. And it’s fast and stable — something I’ve missed out on by using Blogger.
Now that I’ve gotten my hands dirty with MT, I’m even thinking about using it to rebuild my Portfolio section (about 45 pieces in 8 categories right now), using the different entry fields to store variables and relevant text descriptions.
FYI, the DNS changes haven’t gotten to me yet, so a few things here in the comments may be broken or funky until I can change everything over to stopdesign.com. The DNS switch is also causing mail problems, so any mail sent to me may be delayed for the next day or so.
Congrats Doug! Looks like it was a alot of work!
I agree with David - use mod_rewrite to handle all your old, wayward ASP URLs.
RewriteRule ^log/default.asp?id=(\d+)$ /log/$1.php [L]Or something like that. Best of luck!
Looks nice! In fact I probably wouldn’t have noticed if you hadn’t said it… Keep up the good excellent work, which inspires me (and from the looks of things, a lot of other people).
Cool switch Doug, I use MovableType on my site, and not only can you use it for blog entries, but for anything that you want stored in a database for easy retrieval.
I’m currently redesigning, and for my resume I’m storing individual jobs I’ve had before and references using MovableType (all you do is separate content into a bunch of categories, and filter what shows up on a page from that…
<MTEntries category="PortfolioEntries">)MovableType is so flexible, take advantage of it!
Kudos on the move. Based on my experience, you’ll be quite happy with php vs asp. I’m a perl man myself, so if you decide to really geek out, drop me a line. :)
Also, I can’t pass up the opportunity to thank you for sharing your knowledge, insights and experiences on this site. This is my first read every morning, and quite often it has given me just enough inspiration to tackle a hellish day. Plus, I’m finally going to redesign my very 1998-ish personal site to be XHTML-compliant very soon, this site being a motivating factor. So again, thanks.
Looks great, and I’m glad to see you’re doing it. I’ve often wanted to post comments on your posts and now I can do that. Yeah! ;)
On the MT tip, it’s really the way to go with lots of things. Down at my day job we use it to power lots of fairly significant portions of our Intranet and it’s worked really well so far. It’s functionality can go way beyond the typical “blog” implementation and as I’m sure you’ve noticed, most customization is actually fairly simple.
Anyway, looks and works great.
True, David. I used a custom 404 in that case because we were switching from urls based on IDs to urls based on date and post title, wich I think are very nice.
And no regex can handle that ;).
Have your ids stayed the same, Douglas?
Doug, glad to see the RSS feed added to StopDesign—this was the single biggest thing keeping me from reading your site on a regular basis (which I found via Dave Shea, by the way).
If you need template help, Mark Pilgrim recently released more of his to the blogging community, which I’ve found to be helpful:
http://diveintomark.org/about/templates/
GuilleBe - Unfortunately the IDs are not the same. At least they’re not right now. With Blogger, I was using date-related IDs in the query string. For instance, this entry written on the 24th of June would have been
/log/default.asp?date=20030624But MT is giving each post a numerical filename based on the entry ID starting from 1 and padded to six digits (i.e. this entry is/log/000216.php).I guess it’s possible to change the Individual Archive template format to something like
/log/2003/06/24/index.php. And the matching table would be much more scriptable. I’ve only had MT up and running for a couple of days, so there wouldn’t be that many people who have created links to the new archives yet. But with that approach, I don’t know how MT would handle multiple entries in one day. Meaning, how would it auto-increment the file name from index.php to index2.php, index3.php, or something similar?I was just thinking of creating a simple array to put inside a PHP script that matched old dateIDs to MT’s entry ID (assuming I can pass along the query string from an ASP file using mod_rewrite?). With the amount of entries I have, it wouldn’t take that long to create the array manually.
Doug, cudos on the move.
One thing — I’m wondering if your front page will always contain so many entries at the one time? I find it a little off-putting to have to load that all the time to check for something new, is all. Actually, I like the way Mark Pilgrim is handling it right now, with the latest entry displayed and a list of links to the other recent entries he’s done.
Finally man. I’ve spoken to you in email before (remember, istockphoto.. :P) but its nice to have a place to comment on your log entries. GL with all your new frustrating experinces with php and mysql. It isn’t too bad, just remember, caffine is your best friend.
switching from blogger & asp to movabletype & php? seems like a no brainer once you get past the learning curve =]
congrats on the switch, it’s a better idea than you probably realize now.
I got sick and tired of the whole Blogger trip myself and decided to tackle writing my own system from scratch. So far the experiment has gone rather well. The entire site (which only consists of a single page sadly) is powered by dynamic content and features a multiple author system, permalinks and I’m working on the archive presently. I learned a lot about PHP and MySQL and how one goes about writing such a system. It was a lot of fun for me seeing as how I never knew I was a programmer. I’ve decided to launch a second site (better suited to longer posts) using Movable Type or possibly Type Pad when it becomes available. It’ll be very exciting to see your progress with this project.
Thanks for posting your experience with this, it is very helpful, I can relate to the “Changing Wings on the Plane, Mid-flight” concept as this is pretty much what I have been doing at work for the past year. One thing I was wondering is why the shift to open-source tools, don’t get me wrong I think it is a great idea, I am just wondering if it was a political/ethical choice or one based on functionality or cost of the platform/languages. At my work we use Debian Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL which I love primarily due to performance, security and stability. But we also run Coldfusion MX primarily due to the bigger tool box it provides, ease of use and ability to develop applications quickly. I don’t work for Macromedia, but being a one man web army at a university I can say that using CFMX has decreased my development time quite a bit. I think for larger sites a balance of open source and commercial products is neccesary and healthy. Thoughts?
Hey Doug, looking great! Nice to see the switch.
I started using MT just for the blog portion(s) of my site but, after really reading up on all the things it can do, I moved about 90% of my content into it. Now with index templates, css and php includes changing my site around is a snap and I can’t even believe I used to do it any other way.
Blogger was great for me as a beginner blogger. It allowed me to get comfortable with the publishing process, but for advanced users, you just can’t beat Movable Type.
Comments no longer open for this entry.