Hello WordPress, bye bye custom blog code written in Perl. Well the old code is still running, but I’ve wanted to install WordPress for the past few months and finally got around to it this weekend. I had a little bit of trouble getting PHP installed, only because I decided to use the older php4 with the latest mysql, and php4 didn’t seem to want to configure itself using the latest mysql. Fortunately using php5 was a different story and WordPress was a breeze to install.

My reasons for switching from my homegrown code to WordPress are several.

• there was really no way of commenting on stories, only adding them.
• the old code didn’t really archive or categorize stories the way I wanted to
• links to stories didn’t work, and I wanted to join dan’s Planet #code4lib.
• I didn’t use the RSS aggregation features I wrote since I started using Bloglines.
• I’ve been coding more in Python these days and don’t feel particularly tied to my Perl code base any longer. WordPress is PHP, which I’m not a huge fan of, but I think this had more to do with the PHP that I was exposed to more than the language itself. Installing WordPress and the various plugins like the audioscrobbler one you see to the right was very pleasant.
• the WordPress community is extremely rich. I spent some time with Kesa looking at different themes, but in the end decided to stay with the default for now. There are tons of neat plugins to look at.

So what you can expect here is more of the same. I’m going to try to write more about my work as a programmer, mainly as a journal for myself to keep track of what I’m working on, where I’ve been, and where I’d like to go. Perhaps you are thinking spare me the details, where are the pictures of C?! If this is the case you should see a link to the photos over on the right.