Crossover Complete

So, do you notice a big difference? Hopefully you don’t. That’s the whole point of converting templates. There are a few small changes, though:

Tags. I am in the process of switching from category-based classification to tag-based. Why? Well, there are a lot of reasons, but it all comes down to: tags are awesome. If you use del.icio.us or Flickr, you know what I’m talking about. The entries on the current page have all been properly tagged, but you won’t be able to see the true potential until the whole system is tagged.

Comments. They look a little different now, including the “Reponses” box in the left sidebar. They work pretty much the same. Your first comment on the new system may need to be moderated before it displays.

Archives. The archives are pretty different now. The individual entry links are all different. I’ll do my best to preserve old links. I’m relying mostly on tags for organization. My theory is that blog archive indexes are hardly even used, so they don’t need to be prominently displayed or labored over too much. Most people find what they want with Google anyway.

RSS. There is a new RSS feed. Rather than just deleting the old MT one, I’ll manually put in one last entry in the RSS feed that tells you the new feed links. I’ll also be updating the feeds page. When I get around to it.

OK, that’s all for now. Sorry for broken stuff. Let me know what’s broken. And comment!

Oh, and here are the entries that lost out on comments. Give them some comment love:

Visa to the USA (Part 1)
WordPress it is…
DONE with exams!!!
A Taste of Shanghai
To the Consulate
Noodle School
Star Wars Set
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John Pasden

John is a Shanghai-based linguist and entrepreneur, founder of AllSet Learning.

Comments

  1. Testing…

    Yes, comments work. Yay!

  2. Congratulations on the switch!

  3. Welcome to the wonderful world of WordPress!

  4. Looks pretty nice… a long way from the first template iterations I saw. 🙂

  5. just a heads up, on my computer a mac running tiger browsing with safari, the blog entry text appears insanely big, even when i make the text tiny, its still insanely big, i’ve tried this on other macs as well and it stilll doesn’t work. great site, keep it up

  6. Can you put up a screen shot in this post? It doesn’t resemble the old style at all on Safari for Mac 10.3.9. Huge blue font with lines basically overlapping…

  7. Congratulations on getting it all set up.

    You know, if you want, you can redirect people from your old RSS feed to the new one with a simple change to ,htaccess.

  8. Looks great. I have always hated migrating to a new system. You seemed to have managed a very smooth transition indeed.

    I haven’t yet figured out what the advantage of tagging is, care to elaborate more?

  9. Thanks for the heads up on the Safari issue. It was very easily fixed.

  10. Your comment counter doesn’t work. The rest looks good though.

  11. Ooops! Yes, it does!

  12. congratulations. Welcome to wordpress:P I haven’t had spam in my comments since I updated to the lastest version of wordpress. Hopefully, it will be the same for you. Don’t forget to add common spam words in the spam words list.

  13. Nice job!

  14. This is a boring, technical comment regarding typo: in the third line, it reads: “URI” when it should read, URL. Other than that, good movin’ on the update, John. The exam, the visa, and now the site update – it’s all rollin’ along nicely.

    On a side note: I’m not too stoked on hearing you WILL NOT be making it to Northern California, SF Bay Area this time around.

  15. Wilson,

    URLs and URIs are not exactly the same. URI is preferred by geeks these days.

  16. congrats on the move.

  17. URI is also a school in a very small state. Good engineering program.

  18. Nice and familiar.

    Encoding problems in the importation process? Your old comments seem to be in GBK, so the Chinese shows up as blocks in the UTF-8 pages.

    There’s also “修辞” in your “DONE with exams” post that doesn’t render, although the Chinese at the bottom of the post is fine.

  19. zhwj,

    Yeah, there are some problems with characters. I had encoded in UTF-8 in MT, and WP uses UTF-8 as its default encoding, so theoretically there should have been no problems. Obviously there were. I’ll fix that stuff eventually.

  20. Your comments open in a small popup window. When I click on the names of the of the comment posters, it takes me to their websites within that small popup window. Is there a reason that you have it this way instead of those websites opening in their own windows? I know some people (not me) dislike using popups on their sites in general, but since you’re already using them…

  21. Coward,

    Yes, there’s a reason. The commenters’ links are inserted via a PHP function. Unfortunately, for the function comment_author_link() there are no customizable parameters and thus there is no way that I can see to make the links open in a new window.

    I recommend you hold down SHIFT when you click on the links. That makes the links open in a new window.

  22. John, you can use comment_author_url() instead. For example: [a href=”[?php comment_author_url(); ?]” target=”_blank”][?php comment_author(); ?][/a]

  23. What’s up with the random italics?

  24. Brad,

    OK, cool, I’ll try that. The random italics are caused by the underscores, which Markdown interprets as text formatting.

  25. Safari is displaying individual posts with huge blue text. I’m using Panther 10.3.9.

  26. Jessica,

    Thanks for bringing that to my attention. Easily fixed, but I wouldn’t have noticed on my own.

  27. This is seriously insane stuff ! Especially at 3 am ! But probably very usefull to anyone going to the PRC. I would like to know about interesting Chineese blogs
    in English or a good FREE translator Chineese to English tool that translates web
    pages.Please send to : hitchiker1@Lycos.com. Enjoyed MUCHO your site! Thanx!

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