I’ve been blogging on a few different personal blogs since 2002 and have finally got around to aggregating them all together in one spot, over at rachelcunliffe.com. (I’m using the default Wordpress design for now while I focus on content.)

Combining my blogs

It was surprisingly easy to take my original journal blog which had been offline for ages, it was running Wordpress 1.5 (what a blast from the past seeing the old admin interface). That blog was my entry into the world of blogging and I met so many wonderful people through that. Ahh, the good old days of blogging where it was so fresh, so new and such a small world (it seemed).

To start resurrecting the blog, I updated the wp-config.php file to the new host database login information, disabled all the plugins, deleted all the spam, made a backup and uploaded Wordpress 3.0. After seeing a number of problems upgrading Wordpress in a big leap, I was pleasantly surprised to see my blog all back and running, using a theme I made in the summer of 2006! An export of the blog posts split up by about six month chunks (you don’t want the import files to be bigger than 2MB) and then importing into rachelcunliffe.com didn’t take long at all.

The next step was exporting from a Wordpress.com blog I wrote on for a while in 2008 then abandoned. This time it was a much simpler process a quick export and import.

Importing my Tweets

I’ve been also investigating how to archive my tweets. Twitter tools is perfect for tweets you do after adding the plugin to Wordpress, but I also wanted all my old Tweets stored in Wordpress.

There’s a really simple plugin (Twitter importer) which actually imports all your old tweets into a certain category of your choice in one step – no need to worry about exporting your Tweets first. However, the plugin current currently has no options e.g. no filtering out of “@” replies or retweets. I got around this by quickly tweaking the plugin code:

Add:

if (substr($post_title,0,1) != "@" && substr($post_title,0,2) != "RT")

before:

$post_id = wp_insert_post($post);

I did notice that sometimes the plugin didn’t work first time around or didn’t pull them all in, wait a while and then run it again – you can run it multiple times and it won’t make duplicates.

Until I work out how best to display all these tweets, I’m using the Advanced Category Excluder plugin to hide all the old tweets from the homepage and the feed, and just put have on their own tweets category page.

Importing my Facebook Status Updates

Facebook is a little buggy when it comes to this, but I’ve made a simple script to export your Facebook status updates to a CSV file. It’s buggy because sometimes it works, sometimes later on it doesn’t work. It’s also buggy because it only pulls out actual status updates, not links you share or photos you add in your status box. Oh, and it doesn’t go back before about August 2008 when they released a new version of Facebook. That being said, it still exported out over 700 of my status updates.

I then played around with the CSV file a little to get it into the right format that the Wordpress CSV importer plugin requires. These all went into my Facebook status updates category and are also hidden from the homepage for now. Going forward, I’ll either need to use Twitter again to update my Facebook status (using Selective Twitter or find a way to bring in status updates one-by-one automatically (just like Twitter tools does).

The site features lots of custom menus, rich content and, of course a blog.

I spoke on creating custom Wordpress themes and talked about some of the sites we’re working on and have recently worked on and here’s the first part of my talk notes.

While it was the title of the talk, we don’t see our job really as building “custom Wordpress themes”. We see it more as building sites which are easy-to-edit and maintain – using Wordpress as a content management system. This involves lots more than just creating a theme and pressing a few buttons to install it for clients.

Rather than looking at themes and seeing how these can be tweaked to a site, we start from the basics and think about the site’s purpose and the best way to present content – rather than trying to fit their site into pre-determined boxes. We try and encourage clients to not think in terms of “what cool widgets and plugins can I add to my site” but go back to basics of what are they trying to achieve through their site, then looking at ways to do that.

In fact, sometimes Wordpress just isn’t the right tool for the job. Then we look at Drupal – which has a lot more flexibility and functionality for larger community-driven sites. (It’s not always the right tool either.)

Some of the common Wordpress things we do include:

• Putting together new Wordpress sites from scratch
• Redesigning Wordpress sites
• Converting existing sites over to Wordpress from either another CMS (e.g. Blogger, TypePad, MovableType, Expression Engine) or none at all
• Taking PSD design templates and build the Wordpress or Drupal site from them
• Writing our own plugins or using/evaluating/adapting ones out there already.
• Maintaining sites – including upgrades, content, tweaks, and of course the fun job of security (which is becoming a bigger and bigger issue as Wordpress’ popularity and code base grows).

A big part of many of our projects is actually dealing with content – managing and migrating it and making it easy to add content in the future.

Common things we do include providing multiple and creative ways of exploring content which are applicable to the site in question.

For example, we’re currently working on a gorgeous new redesign for The Naptime Chef (new site not yet live) and providing multiple ways to explore her yummy recipes.

We recently redesigned Vampy Varnish – a super popular varnish blog by Kelly Keaton. She wanted people to be able to explore her archives in multiple ways – and for her content, this made most sense by browsing her photos of the nail polishes by either brand or color.

Normally this could be done by just categorizing the posts by brand and color but she has multiple photos per post which are in different colors regularly and sometimes different brands.

The Media Tags plugin solved this problem by enabling tagging of images – so the gallery shows all images with a certain tag.

The only problem is this didn’t allow parent tags so we needed an automatic way to know which tags were colors and which tags were brands for the gallery overview page. The solution was to make the gallery page still look at post categories and list all subcategories of color and brand but then link through to show all images with a matching tag.

This worked well, as she was already categorizing all her posts for her category archives.

We also used a custom post type to handle the mastheads (headers) she designs each month on her blog. Adding content becomes a breeze: she gives the masthead a title, optional background color, optional background image and publishes – past months are automatically archived.

Another common feature of sites we’ve worked on are simple event handling – often this has been for authors we’ve worked with.

They want a simple way to archive their media appearances…

…promote their upcoming appearances:

There’s a great little plugin called The Future is Now which has been around for years but still works nicely for you to timestamp posts in the future but have them appear immediately.

Part 2 of my talk to be posted on my blog

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