Blog in beta

Hello friends, family and valued contacts!

I’m mid-way through a big change to my long-neglected blog, moving it to a new platform, with a new design (coming soon) and some of features that modern blogs should have. Because I’m not there yet, this is the blog in its ‘beta’ form. The URL for this beta version is blog2.frankieroberto.com/weblog, but that will change back to www.frankieroberto.com/weblog when I’m ready to make the switch (and all the beta URLs will be redirected) .

I’ve invited you here to get your feedback and help me get settled into this new blog home.

Some of the changes you might see here are:

  • It’s on WordPress, rather than an ageing Movable Type installation. Any tips for how best to tweak WordPress, or useful plugins gratefully received.
  • Comments are re-enabled again (see reason for closing them). I’m using the default comment settings, with ‘Akismet’ enabled, so we’ll have to see how that works out, spam wise.
  • There’s ‘previous’ and ‘next’ post links on the individual post pages. This should please Martin.
  • Pingback is enabled. Pingback is the new trackback, I hear.
  • The URLs no longer end in .xhtml (I couldn’t get Moveable Type to work without file extensions before). Old URLs should redirect.
  • More blogging (hopefully).

Please leave comments below if you’ve got any words of wisdom for me, or just want to say hello.

You can also start to subscribe to the RSS feed at http://feeds.frankieroberto.com/frankieroberto (the old one will eventually redirect).

I’ll leave this post up, even after the blog comes out of beta, so any comments you leave below won’t get lost to the ether.

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Comments

  1. Andy Roberts said:

    Hi Frankie, it was a good piece of advice from your friend to “just get on with it” and start blogging again with a minimal theme.
    The first thing I would advise is to change permalinks, which should be just a question of filling in a form at the WordPress Dashboardset under Options/Permalinks

    select Custom – /%postname%/

    Posted: January 19, 2008, 8:41 pm # Reply

  2. Frankie Roberto said:

    Why do you advise changing permalinks?

    Posted: January 19, 2008, 11:54 pm # Reply

  3. Andy Roberts said:

    It’s so that the phrase from the post slug appears in the url.

    Posted: January 21, 2008, 7:39 pm # Reply

  4. Frankie Roberto said:

    I don’t see any huge benefit in that. It might improve search engine rankings, I suppose, but that seems fairly unlikely. Plus there’s a disadvantage in that, if you make a typo in a blog post title, you either have to leave the typo in the URL, or change it and break bookmarks, etc. See http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI

    Posted: January 21, 2008, 8:45 pm # Reply

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