In the end, it was WordPress 3.0 that did me in.
Yes, I was using Chyrp for a long time. And I liked it too, except for the little niggly bits that I didn’t, and then the project metaphorically died and I realised those niggly bits would never get fixed.
There was also the part where I was getting annoyed with the collection of entries I’d already built up. This may surprise you, especially if you remember how it went down the last time I started a blog afresh. (That is, fairly miserably.) But that’s the way it is. Last time, I guess I felt like there was no reason to “break” the blogs where they broke. There was nothing particularly momentous about April 2008, in my life, that meant it made sense to start the blog over again there. This time, though, I started university, and a lot has changed thanks to that. I think part of the reason I was finding it hard to build momentum was because I didn’t want many of the older entries to still be part of the blog any more.
However, much as I took pleasure in indulging my worrying tendency towards historical revisionism, I did not delete the old blog. I moved it. It is wholly intact at http://jess.skyness.org/old/, for varying definitions of “wholly”, because:
- The “pretty permalinks” feature broke and I couldn’t fix it, so all the URLs are stuff like jess.skyness.org/old/?action=view&url=university-makes-you-lazy.
- When Chyrp tries to link to things in the un-pretty manner, it generates broken links for tags for some reason, so don’t try clicking the tags in the sidebar or at the bottoms of entries because you’ll get 404s. You can still see the tag cloud, but no clicking on the tags! Unless you like 404s that is.
- I couldn’t work out how to set up redirections, so every link to a post on the old blog will be broken. Yes every single one. So far the only way I can work out to fix this is to add a line to my .htaccess for every single entry’s old location, redirecting it to the new one. There must be a way with regex but I couldn’t get it to work for some reason. Maybe I will work a little harder on this later.
Anyway. It is done. This is the new blog, WordPress-based and new and fresh — and very default, but I’m probably about to go on a customisation binge after posting this, so perhaps everything will be shiny and less default by the time someone reads this. It’ll probably still be other people’s themes and other people’s plugins/work generally, but that’s all right for now!
As for how WordPress 3.0 dealt the death blow to the relationship between Chyrp and I?
Mainly, through having support for custom post types. And custom taxonomies. The customisability of Chyrp in that regard was one of the things that most appealed to me about Chyrp, so WordPress rather stole its thunder. Oh, and didn’t have broken links throughout the admin panel (I hope; I haven’t actually checked this yet, but I assume so). It’s also not dead. And there’s all sorts of pluginy and themey goodness for it!
So I’m very sorry Chyrp, but it’s time that you and I parted ways. Adieu.
