Blog

Goodbye WordPress, Hello VanderBlog!

I like WordPress. I really do. I've been using it as a blogging platform for four or five years, ever since I built VanderBlog 1.0, realized that WordPress was superior, and gave up my own coding for something built by real programmers.

But a few things have perpetually bothered me about my WordPress setup. The big one is site integration. Sure, I could make it look like KyleVanderburg.com, if I spent the time to properly theme it (and re-theme it for every redesign). I could move it back to my webserver and install it in the /blog/ directory, where Vanderblog now is. But then, there's the creativity clause in my Mission Statement:
…to have a firm understanding of the creative process in its entirety from conception to production and to continually keep as much of that process in-house as possible except when other ventures provide a better service more efficiently than is capable by internal means;

Thus, enter VanderBlog 2. It runs on the Hammer platform, it lives on my server, it runs code that I wrote myself and (mostly) understand. It involved some modal box changes to KyleVanderburg.com which I'm excited to try out with other features. It also generates RSS, which is something I didn't know how to do until about 2 hours ago.

Is it as feature rich as WordPress? Not even close. At least, not yet. There's still some work to be done here, like redirecting all the old posts to the new blog (which does contain all the old posts and comments), but it's a start.

Decorative element
Kyle Vanderburg