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Changing from a Hybrid Site to an Entirely Blog-Based Site

By Greg | June 14, 2007

Yesterday I made some big changes to the site, changing the structure from a hybrid (in which the blog was just one part) to a pure blog, altering the permalink scheme, and adopting a new graphic theme. Surely the most important change, though, was implementing the ‘Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handy’ widgetized plugin in the sidebar. Now that is big news.

When I first set up Where Else to Put It? last year, I just used a set of static XHTML pages with a blog dropped into one section. Since I already had a solid and reliable underlying page template which I’ve used on several other sites, I just stripped out the graphical elements and left it completely plain-Jane, figuring I’d come back later and create a new style sheet to go with the structure, whip up some spiffy graphics, and call it good.

Well, having recently become a father (and taken 3 months of paternity leave, after which work was a bit manic), I never took the time to create that new graphic look, and the site just languished with all that black and white with a smidgen of blue. I also knew that I wanted to implement a different permalink structure and make a couple of other major changes ‘under the hood’, and knowing that all those bits of work were still waiting for me effectively acted as a block to keep me from ever actually coming here to write something. Thus the long gap between my last post and this one…

So, finally I took the plunge and decided to:

  1. Try a WordPress theme made by someone else (shock! horror!)
  2. Alter my permalinks to make them immune to future changes in categories
  3. Replace the whole blog-within-a-regular-site structure, so I don’t have to maintain two separate page templates
  4. Of course drop Jack Handy into my sidebar

So here I am, living for the first time ever with a blog theme actually designed by someone else!! Having used my own designs on all my other sites, I naturally couldn’t keep away from the code, and I’ve already gone through and cleaned up some things (IMHO), modified some other things, and generally made it feel a bit more like home. It still feels very odd: this is no longer entirely my own creation! (In a sense, I guess none of my other sites are entirely my own creation either, since I invariably use snippets of code from other people, and of course bright ideas from other people.)

I’ve also set up redirects from all the old static XHTML pages, so everything is now going through the blog software — that’s why you’ll no longer see the main front page at the top level of the site, and everything is stuffed into the ‘blog’ directory. For readers, this probably makes no difference. For me, it just makes life easier not to have two completely separate sets of pages being delivered in completely different ways with completely different underlying code that is nonetheless designed to come out looking exactly the same.

And last but certainly not least, I had to have the Deep Thoughts plugin (widgetized, of course, in keeping with my general ‘make this all lower maintenance’ approach). You’ll find Jack’s deep thoughts over there in the sidebar.

Really, that’s the main reason you should come here now, to check out the latest deep thoughts…

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