I had been using Blogger to run my blog, but some aspects of it aren’t customizable, and the code it outputs looks horrible. So I switched to WordPress, because now everything in theory is infinitely customizable. Hopefully, this change won’t particularly affect you—everything should just work. The rest of this post describes some of the issues I’ve run across in switching to WordPress.
When I was using Blogger, I actually got it up and running pretty quickly, and the default settings didn’t need to be changed too much. Well, I just spent far too much time trying to bow WordPress to my will. I had to install two plugins to make WordPress act in a sane manner: Set default timezone and disable WPAUTOP. The latter plugin makes it possible for me to make new posts without having WordPress indiscriminately throw <br /> tags all over my beautiful HTML. The former plugin makes WordPress stop listing the wrong time zone for UTC time stamps.
It turns out that time zone support in WordPress is dismal. Even with the Automatic timezone plugin, which I tried briefly, I can’t figure out how to make WordPress store all post and comment times in UTC and then display them in the time zone of my choice (so that if I change the time zone later, all of the previously displayed times change accordingly).
I eventually decided to display all times in UTC and just not worry about time zones. The exact times aren’t all that important, and so far, no one who’s posted a comment even lives in my time zone anyway. UTC is a nice default, and besides, it’s cooler than all the other time zones could ever dream of being.
I also installed the OpenID plugin, hoping that it would make logging in with any account as easy as it is in Blogger. No such luck. You can certainly log in using an OpenID, but you have to know your OpenID URL, for one thing. (If you’re on Blogger, log in as your_blog_name.blogspot.com.) But worse than that, when I logged in using my AOL account, it set my display name to “openid.aol.com/yellowantphil.” I imagine I could edit the OpenID plugin to make it set a different display name, but at this point, I decided to allow anyone to post comments without logging in. I might look into how the OpenID plugin works later, but it’s not an especially high priority right now.
Overall, getting WordPress tweaked to my liking took some work, compared to Blogger which more or less worked out of the box. But if nothing else, I like having blogging software hosted on my own website, so that Blogger can’t decide to pull the plug on me or place ads on my page someday.
Next up, I’m going to try using WordPress to power the news feed on my Wacky Wheels site. The news on that site is updated so infrequently that I have been doing just fine with coding all of the news items and creating the corresponding RSS feed by hand. I’m going to try using WordPress on the site just to see how well it scales down to such a minimal format.
Tags: technology
Actually, WordPress stores post times in both UTC and your local time. The UTC time is used for all time-based stuff, while the local time is used only for display purposes (if you use the_time() or the_date() ).
This is actually intentional, so that if you later change time zones, none of the previous displayed times will change themselves. So trying to get it to change past displayed times would naturally be really hard, because it’s specifically designed not to do that.
That makes sense, now that I think about it. I suppose there wouldn’t have been any particular benefit by having all of the displayed times change every time I change time zones anyway. I still think that using UTC will be the simplest, so I’ll just stick with that.