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.

A CMS (Content Management System) is a web-based system designed to host a web-site where the content can vary independently of the site layout. Most CMS’s offer site theming systems where the site layout can be changed easily, and all the content reformats itself to fit.

There are many different approaches to this, Drupal is designed to host many different kinds of content and is a fairly rich implementation. More targeted solutions tend to have different names such as blog for a system predominately orientated around text posts, such as Wordpress, or wiki for systems that encourage high degrees of linking between pages and in-situ editing.

Wiki’s are a form of content management system, where the content can be edited on the web directly. Typically wiki’s are open to anyone to edit, although some (such as this one) can only be edited by authorised users.

A Wiki differs from most others CMS’s by encouraging editing, quickly and in-situ usely with a light-weight markup system for styling the content. This Wiki uses Textile for formatting.

Gallery2 is a highly featured web gallery. I use it across my web-sites here, embedded in both WordPress and Drupal.

It is a complex system, with a very abstracted implementation which is hard to fully understand. Out of the self-hosted galleries it is probably the most suitable for me, but I am oft-tempted to move away from it – Flickr seems tempting, but by the time I bought the features I need, and multiplied that by the number of users using my Gallery it is no longer quite so attractive.

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 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.

The web site is now being hosted on a colocated server in a full blown data center, air conditioning, generators, etc.! This is a side effect of having a dedicated machine for Lands of Stone. Also, it relieves some of the bandwidth on my poor ADSL link.

Angier.co.uk is now being hosted on a nice new server. It is a bottom of the range Duron 1.1GHz with 128Mb RAM and 40G Hard disk. Compared with the old server (100MHz Cyrix, 32Mb RAM, 2G HDD), it is a major boost and only set me back £219.

The transition was totally painless, and parts of the site such as http://gallery.angier.co.uk now get served before you can fall asleep!

For the full spec…