For reasons I have yet to explain in greater detail, I’ve begun moving the Finer Things sites from Tumblr to WordPress. I began the effort this week with /Mac, and things have gone well so far. But there’s a bit of work to be done yet.
I’ve pretty much nailed down what I figure is the 1.0 feature set and functionality of the site, thanks to a few plugins and experimeting with WordPress categories and tags. In fact, the actual process of moving the site to WordPress is the easy part.
The rest of it is manual work like re-tagging and categorizing posts to fit into my vision of making Finer Things sites not just a blog, but a resource; a directory and a community. This will simply take time.
The other big step, finding a functional, well-designed theme for each site, is almost finished as well.
I’m aiming to get this all finished by next weekend. Don’t hold me to it, but that’s my goal. In the meantime, I will continue to solicit, write, and publish Finer Things posts about tips, UI polish, and bugs. Thanks for reading and participation.
Could you at least explain it with little detail? I’m curious to know.
The post is almost ready. I’ve had a lot of work to get done for Agile and Macworld, then Agile took a company vacation/team building trip, and I’m putting the finishing touches on the move to WordPress. It’s almost done, promise!
I'm drafting a post about it now. In a nutshell, though, it boils down to power and management. WordPress and its many plugins offer a ton of power not just to me as a publisher, but you as a reader. It's a lot easier for me to moderate and edit submissions, create a navigation menu with hierarchical categories and drop-down menus, and tag or categorize entire batches of posts.
As a reader, this makes the site a lot easier to use, and you get things like RSS feeds for every category or tag on the site. My vision is to turn all the Finer Things sites into a resource and a community, and not just a linear, throw-away blog. I want them to become searchable directories of tips and useful information, highly organized by tags and categories.
Actually, that's basically my blog post right there. Maybe I should just go ahead and publish this comment as a post.
David Chartier
Finer Things site owner