I’m on winter vacation right now, and I don’t plan on going anywhere. Therefore, there’s no better things for me to do but to pay some attention to my oft neglected personal website. Over the last four or five days, I have been busy converting TJ Online from Xoops to WordPress, and the website you now see is the finished product of that effort. Xoops is a nice piece of software, but over the years I’ve discovered that it’s a bit overkill for a personal website. I chose to convert to WordPress because… everyone else is running WordPress. It is the most popular blogging platform out there for a reason, so it seems like a good choice. Converting my site into a blog also will help motivate me to write more… or at least I hope ;) . I’ve also chosen to convert this site because it gets very little visitors, so screwing around with this site won’t really affect my total traffic by much.
Since WordPress didn’t have an automatic import tool for Xoops and that I wanted to keep as much of my old data as possible, I manually moved every article, download, and gallery picture from Xoops to WordPress. By manual, I meant manually copying and pasting posts, uploading photos, and modifying the database via PHPMyAdmin. It’s boring and time consuming work, but I am used to doing this stuff. Compared to moving my data, installing WordPress and plug-ins was pretty easy. I really like the fact that WordPress has integrated a plug-in search into the admin panel. It makes finding and installing plug-ins so convenient. Compared to Xoops, WordPress is simpler. There are definitely some areas where Xoops is stronger, but thus far I have found that WordPress is meeting my needs for this website.
Anyways, this is more or less the completed website. I might add some small things here or there, but the look (modified from the understated but elegant “Piano Black” theme from mono-lab) is here to stay. Since the theme itself is primarily black and shades of gray, I will try to use bright backgrounds to liven up this place, and as a start I’ve employed a photo of some of the fuchsia in my family’s backyard. Anyways, hopefully all the changes will make this site more user friendly and attract more visitors.
Lastly, I hope everyone will have a happy holidays.
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