I migrated Loving Jacqui to new blogging software, WordPress, so I can use the comments again.

Previously, I used FTP (file transfer protocol — a method of publishing your web pages to the server) “Classic” Blogger to publish web pages to a server and blogKomm, a .php script to keep comments beneath my posts on my own pages.

I liked it for design reasons since Blogger used popups for comments, which are less user friendly and didn’t suit the look and feel of my blog.

However, look and feel be damned I say! I kept on getting slammed with comment spam. Also, it stored all the comments in one text file meaning the entire file had to be scanned every time someone opened a web page. As the file grew longer, it would naturally degrade speed and performance and this could only get worse.

WordPress on the other hand uses a combination of core files, theme files (determining the look of a site, the position of page elements, etc.), and a database to pull different parts of a page together including posts and comments “on the fly”.

This is actually slower than using normal web pages on a server, but has the advantage that it can handle hundreds or thousands of comments much easier. Oh, and it’s well maintained software with better anti-spam solutions. And it’s a lot more fun to use for publishing than Blogger’s is.

Classic Blogger, believe it or not, rebuilt most of the website every time you published one post. So it was fast in the beginning, but now with over 100 posts, took longer each time I used it. So you’d click the “Publish Now” button and wait. And wait.

Then it would tell you it was taking a long time (as if you didn’t already know). Then ask if you wanted to continue. Why yes, you do. So you’d click a button telling it to do what you told it to do five minutes ago. Often this would happen again.

Now it’s quicker. Using the new software, for all intents and purposes since you’re only publishing the one post and updating a few entries in the database, the lag time is about the same as when you click the send button of an email. The amount of data transmitted is similar.

For web page download speed from your perspective, WordPress can use “gzip” compression to reduce their size and serve them to you quicker, provided your browser supports it. WordPress also can create “cache” files (static files generated automatically the first time a user visits a page, so when subsequent users visit, they see the cache file and the database doesn’t need to be queried as often) to handle higher volume if necessary, something which has not been a problem!

Greek blogger Nick of ngtech.gr has also devised an interesting change to WordPress’s cache module so it compresses the cache file and stores it as such, then it’s served as needed. Other solutions involving cache don’t allow for any compression at all or, if they do allow compression, force your server to do the work of compressing the cache file each time a user’s web browser requests it.

This puts a drain on server resources especially in a shared hosting environment — where several websites share one HTTP (static page) server and a separate MySQL (database) server.

Unfortunately, I can’t use WordPress’s cache function while keeping the options to switch themes between “Original Blue” and Ghastly Pink”. Some people claim the wp-cache plugin can be modified to overlook the stylesheet cookie and still function. However, I have never seen a solution which actually works. If you have one, please advise!

In addition to migrating over posts (using a script) and comments (by hand!), I also rewrote the XHTML and CSS for my theme so it could validate as proper XHTML. Blogger produced buggy code that never validated. WordPress is capable of producing clean code.

(For example, using the old code, in Internet Explorer 6 on long web pages, the bottom half of the sidebar would be stuck to the bottom and there’d be a huge gap between it and the top half. Using the old code, I hadn’t yet been able to fix it and now I don’t have to.)

I removed the flyout navigation menu above each post, put in a navigation header at the top, added a calendar in the sidebar (viewable only in non-Internet Explorer browsers and Internet Explorer 7 and up) so you can browse for any posts published on specific days, and included feed capabilities in case you want to get Loving Jacqui in your favourite feed reader — I’m told this is becoming a popular way of getting blog and news content.

Oh, and I installed a new photo album because the old one was so difficult to use. I didn’t really like it. Yes this new one was complicated to install; I had to make some special accommodations on my web server to get it to work…

… but now, how do I create a new photo gallery?

Well, I make a file on my computer with a name, put photos in it, and FTP it up to my server. And that’s it. The file becomes a new gallery and any photos are named automatically based on their file names. The software also chooses one of the files as a thumbnail. I can change that later if I wish.

Very sweet. So it’s as easy as backing up files.