Last July, I bought Veron­ica a domain name for her birth­day. (What can I say? I’m old-fashioned when it comes to gift giv­ing.) I installed Word­Press, and we spent a while cus­tomiz­ing themes, installing plu­g­ins, and get­ting the site look­ing just how she wanted…

…Then the semes­ter started, and she had more impor­tant things to do than start blog­ging. But in the new year, she’s started writ­ing on a vari­ety of top­ics, from book reviews to run­ning tech­nique, to a new nation-wide stu­dent group she’s started. So, go check her new site out at Divagatious.com!

A few weeks ago, I tried to make a sim­ple change to this site. It ended up tak­ing me more than an hour to fix the slew of unnec­es­sary prob­lems that arose when I made the alter­ation. I’ve used Mov­able Type on this site for quite a few years, and it’s always been prob­lem­atic; things break when upgrad­ing the soft­ware, plu­g­ins don’t work as adver­tised, the doc­u­men­ta­tion is per­pet­u­ally in a state of incom­plete­ness, I’ve had con­stant prob­lems with the com­ment­ing sys­tem, etc. I spent quite a bit of time dig­ging around in code try­ing to fig­ure out how to fix things or to just make them work in the first place. For me, the time I wasted last month was the last straw. I’d tried out Word­Press this sum­mer, and I decided it was time to make a com­plete switch to that platform.

So far, every­thing has been much faster and eas­ier with Word­Press. Plu­g­ins install auto­mat­i­cally, are gen­er­ally eas­ily con­fig­urable, and — per­haps best of all — there are many, many to choose from. With Mov­able Type, I was often lucky to find a plu­gin to do what I wanted, and in gen­eral plu­g­ins aren’t updated very fre­quently. With Word­Press, there are often two or three options for ful­fill­ing a par­tic­u­lar need, and Word­Press devel­op­ers seem, on the whole, to be much more active in the upkeep of their work.

Along with the behind-the scenes soft­ware swap comes a visual makeover, as well. There is a very vibrant Word­Press theme devel­op­ment com­mu­nity, with a ton of great visual styles to choose from. I started with a theme called Phyto cre­ated by WebDesignLessons.com, and did a fair amount of cus­tomiza­tion to make it my own. Between the theme and var­i­ous plu­g­ins, the new ver­sion of the site has a num­ber of new bells and whis­tles. All the mp3s on my record­ings pages now have play but­tons so you can lis­ten with­out hav­ing to open any other pro­grams. Word­Press is great at catch­ing spam, so there’s no reg­is­tra­tion, log­ging in, or word ver­i­fi­ca­tion for leav­ing com­ments. If you sign up for a free Gra­vatar (a Glob­ally Rec­og­nized Avatar), your image will even show up next to all your com­ments on this site. My book cov­ers and infor­ma­tion now come from the open-source non-profit Open Library, rather than from Amazon.

So, take a look around and tell me what you like or don’t like. I’ve gone back through the last year or two of posts to make sure every­thing is for­mat­ted cor­rectly, but older entries may look a lit­tle screwy until I have a chance to fix them. I’m sure there are still some bugs to be worked out too, so let me know if you find any­thing that doesn’t seem to work.

This week, I fin­ished work on a new web site for the Ten­nessee Coun­cil for the Social Stud­ies. From the site:

The Ten­nessee Coun­cil for the Social Stud­ies is an asso­ci­a­tion devoted to pro­vid­ing information,resources, and sup­port for all those involved in social stud­ies edu­ca­tion. This includes K-12 teach­ers, super­vi­sors of instruc­tion, and col­lege pro­fes­sors, in the var­i­ous dis­ci­plines inter­ested in and involved in the social studies.

Check it out at tncss.org