A long time ago, when the web was young, to run a personal web site you needed to edit every individual page. This was done either directly in the language of the web page (html) or using a wysiwyg editor. These pages needed individually uploading to the web server, and the links between them needed manually maintaining.

The blog came about to make this easier for quickly posting new entries. The main features of a blog are themed pages, on-web editing, a front page listing recent posts and a detailed page holding a more complete entry.

Most systems support comments, image posting, rss feeds and lots of other goodies under the hood.

Wordpress is the mot popular and can do most things out of the box. Drupal is another system I use, which can be configured as a blog, amongst other things.

Wordpress is a top-notch blogging engine. It is very good, especially to get a site up and running quickly. My family all use Wordpress blogs, and I am unlikely to get them to change.

It is easy to theme, but is manifestly a blog engine. People bend it into a CMS on a regular basis, but it all looks like too much work for any sane person.

Drupal is a kick-ass CMS, which can be used in too many ways to mention.

I am using it here as a blog and a wiki.

Why is Drupal so good? Because it is clean, and flexible. The code is a dream to read, and once you get inside the head of the developers you can do anything. It is a developers CMS, not a users CMS. So, if you want a site built, give Drupal to a developer, get back your site that does what you want, and then run it yourself.

I also do freelance Drupal development (funny that).

Yaki is a Wiki/Blogging platform with some really nice features. The main one is that it is extremely light weight. Pages and posts are simple files, with a set of headers at the top that define the details (tags, dates, etc). Mirroring and backups of the site can then be done with any file synchronisation tool.

I toyed with using it on this site, since I wanted to add Wiki-Style behaviour, but ended up using my old favourite for more complex sites, Drupal.

I have migrated this site back to Drupal. Bye, bye WordPress.

I moved the Silver Lexus theme across first, which was a very interesting exercise, but also fairly straightforward, but time consuming. Drupals theming system is very flexible and can do most things quite easily. It is therefore surprising the general lack of quality themes available “off the shelf”. My only theory is the type of user. Drupal seems to target itself more at the professional user, who is more likely to pull together their own website appearance anyway.

Conversion of the posts was very straightforward (apart from accidentally sending Twitter 200+ updates of new blog postings – oops). Comments were a little trickier since the site has been moved a few times and the comment texts were a bit of a mashup of previous comment titles mixed with comment bodies. This part I dealt with by hand.

Widgets were more of a problem, a couple were available off the shelf. A couple, I wrote my own implementation of. A couple were simple copies of the Wordpress version. And the remaining few bit the dust.

Gallery integration was so easy that I wondered why I left it to last.

I changed back because I am now doing a fair bit of Drupal freelance work, and keeping my skills razor sharp seemed a good idea. I was dallying with Yaki a novel, clean, wiki based system, but felt that becoming hot at Python and another system would not be helpful to my current goals. Nice system though, and I am using Drupals freelinking module to add a wiki style flavour to the blog.

I have finished migrating back to Wordpress now.

Why? Because I am not actively doing any Drupal work at present, so it seemed a big overhead maintaining Drupal blogs along with my families Wordpress blogs. The anti-spam technology was different for both, and both needed upgrading regularly, plus there are always advisories to patch. Now I only have to worry about one set of technology. Also, I wasn’t doing anything particularly special in my blogs that Wordpress couldn’t do anyway.

But, why not move the other blogs to Drupal? Because, all said and done, Drupal is much less end-user friendly and the people writing in those blogs have more to worry about than playing with fancy CMS tools.

Since I setup Google Sitemap and robots.txt across my sites the GoogleBot has become slightly less intense, and is now only responsible for about 25% of the bandwidth that the sites all use! I still think that the spidering is a bit intense for personal web sites, and it seems not to be taking much notice of the sitemaps recommendations, but it is now down into the realms of acceptable behaviour.

I recently changed my stats package for the web sites I run, and I noticed that web crawlers are responsible for over 80% of the bandwidth that my sites are using. GoogleBot is the monster crawler, covering over 80% of that. The main difference between GoogleBot and the others is that GoogleBot is taking the images too, probably for Google Image Search.

With my Galleries, this is quite a load – so I have added all the Gallery pages to robots.txt to try and stop them indexing them. Also, I have implemented Google Sitemap across all sites to try and get Google to back off from re-indexing unchanging content. Hopefully, these steps will result in the percentage dropping to something more reasonable.

Dates are now in UK format, sorry for any confusion.

I have been running a home grown, low key journal for years using a bit of PHP and MySQL. But now I’ve moved to mainstream blog software WordPress I have started to discover many little features such as in link monitoring, RSS and Atom feeds, pinging monitor sites, searching on Technorati.

Using these tools I have discovered another WordPress blogger just starting out on the Paul McKenna “I can make you thin” book and CD – inblognito. I like the categorisation, and may adopt a similar technique here. Good luck.