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!

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

I’ve built this on the latest version of Movable Type Open Source, and have taken advantage of some of its cool features and plugins. Rather than using categories, all my entries are now tagged with relevant keywords. In the left sidebar, you can find a tag cloud which shows all of these keywords with font sizes proportional to their frequency of usage. Clicking on one of these tags will take you to a list of all entries that bear that tag.

At the bottom of the right sidebar, you’ll see a section entitled “Recent Activity.” This replaces the “My del.icio.us” section from my previous site, and pulls in links I’ve shared on del.icious, Digg, and Google Reader, and videos I add to my favorites on YouTube.

My photo gallery looks much the same, but now clicking on a photo thumbnail (but not an album thumbnail) opens a Slimbox layer rather than taking you to a new page. Once the Slimbox layer is open, you can navigate through the album with your arrow keys.
I have a couple of other things in the works, and if I ever get a chance to finish them, I’ll let you know about them.