This website’s description on Google and elsewhere is “Musings and related links on Mancunian Paul Gregory’s favourite things, from Buffy to REM, including photographs.”

That’s from my Open Directory listing and is somewhat dated. At the present moment, there are no photographs and no mention of Buffy or REM. And I’m not even really a Mancunian, if we’re being picky.

I promise to resolve this as soon as possible with an article on Buffy The Vampire Slayer, an article on R.E.M. and the introduction of some photographs. In the meantime, this article exists to be found by anyone searching for these things. If you’d like these musings sooner, chivvy me along in the comments.

A technical switch

My previous framework, MODx, was great and all, but over time I realised that practically everything I needed from a personal site could be fulfilled by a blog. While there are some great blog solutions for MODx, they are largely just mimicking the features of other systems in what can be quite convoluted ways. I tried WordPress on another domain and quickly grew to like it. So here we are. Powered by WordPress.

I feel slightly unfaithful, having been involved with MODx, but I’m not walking away from that system entirely and look forward to the new versions in the pipeline. I may very well switch back in a year’s time.

One of the things I liked about WP is that there are both Posts and Pages, but the Pages system is a little disappointing. First, the search doesn’t search pages, it just searches blog posts. Second, although you can customise the format of Post urls, there’s no equivalent facility for Pages. This means that while you can have /year/postname.html, you are stuck with /pagename. There are a bunch of posts about this in the support forum pre-dating 2.2 but still no change. I have a handful of pages that have reasonable PageRank and I’d like to keep the exact same URL. I was able to do so when I moved from static pages to MODx, so I really want to be able to do so with WordPress. What made it worse was you can’t just set the pagename as ‘hello.html’ because it automatically strips out the dot. So my first hack to WP code was to let dots through into the page name. Problem solved.

That said, many pages are being migrated to backdated blog posts - partly to solve the search problem, and partly to make it clear how dated some text is.

A behavioural switch

With my site becoming a straight-forward blog, what is to happen to my LiveJournal? Well, the change there is subtle. LJ will be primarily ephemeral, conversational posts, but above all it’s social, addressing an audience of people I know. It will be a lot more “friends-only”. I may bounce off ideas there which I later write up for a longer post here. I will cross-link to key posts. Articles here will be aimed at people stumbling across the site, simply because there’s more people I don’t know than people I do. As I haven’t actually written many long public articles on LJ for a while, for most people this will probably seem like I’m publishing additional stuff rather than moving stuff.

What is to happen to posts on forums etc? They’ll continue, but I’m likely to start making shorter forum posts and link to longer responses here.