That is, an excuse for a meta-post, and some dry technical info on nu-FT.
I am very impressed with WordPress – both with the internal architecture and the external functionality. The FT regulars have had to get used to a new way of writing with more clever bits and pieces to get the hang of, but I hope they prefer this to the inflexible austerity of blogger. And it’s not that difficult to get the hang of. Is it?
The dynamic db-ness of nu-FT means we get more of an idea what people are reading, what they are looking for, and provides them better links between the articles. There are still over 100 articles in “dead” html files which I’m slowly incorporating into the db to give them a new lease of life. The old articles are no longer forgotten, not now that everything is open to comment, and we have our own “New Answers” (sorry) keeping things lively.
I do worry about SQL outages though. (I bet there’s a WP plugin out-there that periodically saves out a “frozen” front page and serves that when the db is down, hmmm.)
Talking of plugins – I’ve learned that there really is no (well, very little) need to hack WordPress. There are plugins out there to do almost everything you’d want. Though in all honesty I’ve written a good few FT-only functions, and it’s not too difficult. Though the one place that WordPress really lacks is some decent tutorials and documentation on the “right way to do it”. (I have no idea how to make use of the WP cache in my bespoke functions – but I’m working on it!)
Enough. But before we go back to actually readable posts, here’s some info for the curious
Non-Standard Plugins
akismet the “Worst Offenders” remix from http://boakes.org/ – a life saver getting rid of spam comments
podPress – for the podcasts and media players
Related Posts – a hit! (Still needs some work)
CountPosts – possibly not the best hit-counter, but the simplest
InSeries – a more explicit way of relating posts
and at the “back end”
Search Regex –with my own modification to cope with FT’s large database. Great for updating dead links.
Role Manager – why isn’t “site designer” a standard WordPress Role?
Some stats
Posts on FT: 9302 (including the archive obv)
Article views: 252,100
Comments: 1203
Spam comments caught: 2790 (most of it in the first couple of weeks – do the spammers learn to not bother??)
% of spam relating to poker: ~98%
Search hits for a certain football related song: 815 (of which 450 in the last 48 hours)
Search hits with “indie” in search: 1167
Podcast downloads: 962 (129 most recent episode) in-line plays are not logged :-(