new blogging direction
Last month a hacker found a way into royby.com’s pMachine control panel, deleted most of the data and left me some cute messages. In it’s current form, royby.com is over 6 years old, so that was a lot of data to lose. However, it wasn’t really a problem because the data was backed up and it didn’t take too much effort to restore it.
What the incident did do though was to remind me that for a long time now I’ve been meaning to replace the now obsolete pMachine blogging software with something that is supported and still under constant development. I also want to change the overall design, (I’m certainly tired of the old design now), restructure the overall site design and consider the direction that I want royby.com to take.
Every time I consider beginning this project however, I experience a sharp stabbing pain in my forehead accompanied by a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. It’s not that I’m not capable of undertaking all of these tasks, it’s the amount of time that I know they will take. Time that I just don’t have right now.
So I’ve decided that, rather than embarking on a major overhaul to all the above mentioned areas, baby steps are going to be the order of the day. I’ll make small tweaks here and there to the site design until I get time to code a new set of templates and change the CMS. Expression Engine has replaced pMachine as Ellis Labs prime content management tool and I have it installed and under development, but I can see that it will take some time to get it to the point where I can migrate my data from pMachine.
Expression Engine is a natural progression after using pMachine for a number of reasons, but the primary one is the ability to migrate data to the new system. There is no literature about such a migration to the latest version of Wordpress or indeed to a program such as Drupal for instance. Other than that, the support team at Ellis Labs are just so helpful if there is a technical problem. And won’t there always be a technical problem when you are working with an application for the first time?
The Expression Engine forum holds a wealth of information as does their Knowledge Base and Wiki. There is a healthy philosophy at Ellis Labs which I recognised when I first began using pMachine and your queries are always answered in a timely fashion by people who know what they’re talking about and who take a real interest in ensuring that your technical problems are solved.
So, stay tuned for more information on how I progress with the gradual re-build of royby.com.
