What I Was Using

For the past 18 months, I used RapidWeaver’s blog software to create the blog. RapidWeaver is a Mac website building application for people who want a good-looking site without having to hand code HTML and CSS. The biggest advantage of using RapidWeaver’s blog software is the blog matches the look of the rest of the site. But RapidWeaver’s blog software has two disadvantages.

First, the entire blog is treated as a single page. When you add a new post to the blog and export it, RapidWeaver creates the entire blog, not just the parts that changed. If your blog has a lot of posts, creating the entire blog every time you add a post is wasteful.

Second, RapidWeaver blogs do not provide navigation links to read older posts. Suppose your blog has 50 total posts and displays 10 posts per page. Someone visits your blog, reads the 10 most recent posts and wants to read the next 10 posts. The visitor can’t do that. All he or she can do is click archive links to read older posts.

I could live with these two weaknesses, but I encountered a third problem. When I created the blog with RapidWeaver, HaloScan was the built-in way to add comments to the site. HaloScan was purchased by JS-Kit. They are currently in the process of discontinuing HaloScan, moving them over to Echo, their new commenting system. Echo is not free, and I didn’t need all of its features so it was time to move on.

Finding a New Commenting System

Because a blog without comments isn’t much of a blog (I can write articles on my site if I want to share information without comments), I searched for a new commenting system. I found two systems to examine: Disqus and Intense Debate.

Disqus and Intense Debate had instructions on adding it to blogging platforms like WordPress and Blogger, but no RapidWeaver instructions. They had code to embed into a blog, but I couldn’t find a place to place the code in RapidWeaver.

I decided to see if there were better blogging solutions, and I came upon WP-Blog, which is a plug-in that lets you use a WordPress blog that matches the look of a RapidWeaver site. So I decided to try WordPress and WP-Blog.

Installing WordPress

Installing WordPress was very easy for me because my web host has support for Fantastico. Fanatastico lets you perform a one-click install of WordPress. The only thing I had to do was rename my old blog directory on my FTP site because I wanted to use the same directory for my WordPress blog.

After installing WordPress I logged into my WordPress account. From there I could access tools to import old blog posts to the WordPress blog. I used the RapidWeaver blog’s RSS feed to import my posts. As a bonus, I was able to use the Blogger import tool to import the posts from my old Blogger blog. It even imported the comments from Blogger.

The importing went well. The images from the RapidWeaver blog were missing, but I expected that. I didn’t have too many images to upload so it wasn’t a big problem. There were some line spacing issues importing the Blogger posts, but the posts were readable.

One last thing I did was change the permalink structure. The initial permalink structure is to use the post number like p41 or p92. I wanted more meaningful names so I changed the structure to use the month, year, and title. But this caused a problem because I didn’t have a .htaccess file in the blog directory. I created one in a text editor, pasted the code WordPress provided, and uploaded the .htaccess file to my site.

Installing WP-Blog

At this point I had my WordPress blog working, but I was using the default theme, which didn’t match the look of my site. I had to install WP-Blog. I copied the plugin, WP-Blog.rwplugin to the following location:

/Users/Username/Library/Application Support/RapidWeaver

After copying the WP-Blog plugin, I opened my site in RapidWeaver and added a WP-Blog page to my site. I opened the page inspector and configured the blog, including setting up the following information:

• The location of the blog
• The date format
• The number of archive links to show on the sidebar
• The location of the search field
• The RSS feeds
• Whether or not to allow permalinks
• Whether or not to allow comments

When I had the new blog set up, I exported the page. The export created four items:

• A files folder
• An index_files folder
• index.html
• index.php

I uploaded the files folder, the index_files folder, and index.php to my site, and my WordPress blog looked like the rest of my site.

Conclusion

So far I’m happy with the switch to WordPress. I have a blog that matches the rest of my site, has comments without my having to install a separate commenting system, has navigation links for older posts, and has search capabilities.

Update

I did not make myself clear when I originally wrote this post because I keep getting questions about commenting systems. I use the built-in WordPress commenting system.

I have not used or installed Disqus, Intense Debate, or any other commenting system. Because of this, I cannot answer any questions about what commenting system is best or answer any question about installing Disqus, Intense Debate, or any other commenting system.

Until I find a suitable commenting system, use the Contact link in the sidebar if you have any questions or comments about the blog posts.

The first setback is health-related. For the past six weeks I’ve been battling an injury to my lower back. Because of the injury, my back stiffens up and causes a lot of pain when I sit for more than 10-15 minutes. This makes writing difficult because writing, like programming, requires blocks of uninterrupted time to be done at its best. I’m not able to finish as much as I could if I were able to sit down for 3-4 hours and crank out some material.

The second setback is Apple’s continuation of the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) on the iPhone SDK. I’m surprised the SDK is still under NDA after the opening of the iPhone App Store, but the NDA still stands, and it’s causing me two problems. First, I can’t ask any questions about the SDK, which makes writing the iPhone material take longer than it normally would. I can live with that, but I can’t live with the second problem. I can’t release the book until the NDA is lifted. Even if I had the book finished today, you couldn’t read it. I have no idea when Apple will lift the NDA.

I would like to eventually move the more interesting posts from the old blog to the new one, but for now, I’ve placed a link to the old blog on the site map. The link to the old blog appears only on the blog page. I didn’t want to litter the whole site with links to an old blog.