When I upgraded to WordPress 2, I turned on the Akismet plugin. The description of the plugin is to the point: “Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web serivce to see if they look like spam or not.”

I haven’t had to moderate a spam comment since I enabled it.

Wow, there are a lot of themes for Wordpress. I picked this one from Alex King’s style competition. Unfortunately, the previous theme I had (”Fresh Mondrain”) hasn’t been updated. Maybe I’ll bite the bullet and dig into it….

I just upgraded ammond.org to the latest version of WordPress. I doubt anyone will notice, but in case they do, yes, things might be broken.

Yes, the theme is ugly, I’ll fix that later.

For both visitors to the site, you’ve already noticed that the style has changed. I had been searching for a replacement for Movable Type, to take advantage of updated services on twinight. I toyed with PHP Nuke and Postnuke, but while powerful, I don’t need a full-featured CMS for my simple blog. While visiting a link from a mailing list, I noticed it was created with WordPress, which I hadn’t heard of. A quick perusal decided it for me, and I’m in the process of moving all the content to it.

Currently all the archives are still in MT, but that will be rectified in the near future. I may integrate separate Spitfire blog into the main site as a category, or leave it alone but convert it as well.

After switching I started search for WP goodness, and discovered the all the noise about the new licensing for MT. I understand the MT creators wanting to generate income from what they’ve developed, but don’t believe that it will work in the long run. Taking what was once freely available for almost all use and changing to a free for small use (with a “look the other way” mentality) but charging for any large site is IMO doomed to fail. There are too many alternatives in the product space that are free and unrestricted that the user base has no real need to stay (other than inertia).

We’ll see how it plays out. Until then, I need to learn PHP and either find or code the MT plugins I had used. Integration with Gallery is the prime candidate. The “I’m reading now” amazon.com link isn’t as important. One nice thing about WP is that it is generated on the fly, allowing for more dynamic content. Ever-changing gallery picture, anyone?

I’ve added a new page, a “zeitgeist” look at what search engine queries have taken people here. I saw Movable Type plugins page, and pulled it down. The result is an interesting textual display: the more times a string was in a search engine’s referral query, the larger the font is in the list.

The longest effort was actually wrapping the resulting html to make it look like the rest of the site. I need to find a good CSS tutorial and reference.