Elliott C. Back: Technology FTW!

First post.

Posted in General by Elliott Back on October 24th, 2004.

First post. This is the first post of my transition from the basically terrible bblog to WordPress. I’ve installed Kubrick, a great script, and am right about to add my headers. Stay tuned! XML to come!

You might be wondering why I would switch from Bblog to Wordpress? There are two reasons:

1) Wordpress is alive. Alive means I get free support. Alive means it supports the latest protocols. Alive means it isn’t full of bugs. Bblog, on the other hand, is a mess of bugs, old features, and ugly code.

2) Kubrik, a drop inWordPress template. It’s clean, easy to install, and pretty. I’m going to have a lot of fun taking this as a base to modify over time, because it’s well built–the perfect introduction to WordPress.

You can find my old blog entries at the Elliott Back Archives, but all new entries will be posted here. In addition, all the old links are being migrated here, as well.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 24th, 2004 at 12:55 am and is tagged with ugly code, bblog, new entries, bugs, protocols, transition. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

Viewing 9 Comments

    • ^
    • v
    So guess what-- comments work pretty well, too!
    • ^
    • v
    Good luck with WordPress.
    • ^
    • v
    Wasn't sure if I should leave a comment in general or what...
    Hey, if you're going to link to my blog, can you please do so with the blog title instead of with my name? You had it so before, and I don't know why you changed it.
    • ^
    • v
    No problem Erin. I copied all the records from my feedreader's XML files, which means they had what I had in the reader, not on the old blog. So, it's not really that I changed it on purpose, it just ended up changed. I'll go revert that now, and clean up any others I may have missed.
    • ^
    • v
    Thanks, man. ^_^
    • ^
    • v
    I'm just curious - do you really think the Wordpress code is cleaner than the bBlog code? And aside from multiuser support (which I've been considering adding to bBlog), what features/protocols does Wordpress support that you wanted? I looked at WP a while ago, and I didn't really see what it had on bBlog (besides a larger userbase). The index.php "template" vs. Smarty templates seems like a big win for Smarty to me in terms of maintainability.

    The big problems I see with bBlog after using it for a while are that the admin interface design is mediocre at best in usability terms, the admin copy, bblog.com site copy and documentation reads like it was written by somebody for whom English is a third language, and the bblog.com site itself is terribly unprofessional looking. The thing is most of these problems don't affect the actual functionality of bBlog for me, and aren't enough to get me to switch away from using Smarty templates (though I gather Wordpress has support for Smarty now, I don't really know how well that works if nobody uses it and it isn't built around it).

    The developer community at bBlog does seem somewhat anemic, bordering on dead, I agree with you on that. But then again I've found adding features to be pretty trivially easy if I want to do it myself. If they fixed the aforementioned marketing and presentation issues, they'd probably have a big enough user base that more developers would present themselves, but I also think the core guys are partially to blame, they don't seem terribly interested in the bugs or patches that people post either or in announcing feature lists for 1.0 or rallying the development talent that's obviously lurking around there to get 1.0 done.

    Half of me wants to be convinced to switch to WP (or something else, but I was unable to find anything else out there that seemed better suited to my needs). The other half wants to fix the deficits in bBlog.
    • ^
    • v
    Hi Raefer,

    I really do think the Wordpress model, if not the code itself, it cleaner than bBlog. Plugins in Wordpress use the idea of streams that you can attach to to do processing on, which makes it easy to drop in a plugin to filter any of the output streams. BBlog, on the other hand, uses Smarty, in its own words, to allow template construction without knowledge of PHP. Well, Smarty is its own programming language, and since I know PHP, I prefer having it open to me, rather than fussing with extending Smarty. So, in that regard, it's better.

    Also, for a bug in WP, or something not working right, one look at the forums is a solution. There's in issue in 1.2 (current version) that's been fixed in 1.3 CVS which I fixed by reading the forums. Bblog, on the other hand, has random bugs in random places, that are fairly hard to spot. It's just not dependable! For example, sending and receiving trackback is iffy, the RSS plugin is sketchy, etc.

    Wordpress offers the advanced features such as RSS enclosures, proper XML encoding, and internationalization without any customization--and they work out of the box. Wordpress is also multi-user, and has a central page template, which I find a useful feature--no more tracking down a dozen smarty files.

    Switch to Wordpress. It's the best.
    • ^
    • v
    Can you tell me how to switch from bBlog to wordpress keeping all my posts?

    Thanks.
    • ^
    • v
    Wordpress is alive. Alive means I get free support. Alive means it supports the latest protocols. Alive means it isn’t full of bugs. Bblog, on the other hand, is a mess of bugs, old features, and ugly code.
 

Trackbacks

(Trackback URL)

close Reblog this comment
Powered by Disqus · Learn more
blog comments powered by Disqus