The Nerd just left my office and declared that I should be proud because I just set up my first database connection string. Realistically, I didn’t; he did. But I did the typing. It was all for a new blog software product we’re trying out.
This week has been one of those that started out badly and fortunately has gotten progressively better. It began with a couple of unpleasant emails on Monday. One had to do with our forum, which has been making me insane for weeks. As some readers know, we installed a forum so people could ask questions. But it has been repeatedly attacked by online nastiness, so we kept kludging in more things in an effort to make it more secure.
This week, after getting an email from a real person about how difficult it was to register for our forum, I decided I’d had enough. It was getting stupid and I made an executive decision that it’s time to deem the whole “PHP experiment” a giant failure. For those who don’t know, PHP is a programming language used mostly on Linux and Unix servers. Historically, we have used the Windows equivalent, which is ASP because our web sites are hosted on a Windows server. But I couldn’t find any forum or blog software that wasn’t PHP-based. So I got new Unix hosting for just the blog and forum. It was a drag.
Fast forward to this week, and finally, finally, I found new forum software that runs on our Windows server. The Nerd (James) is a Windows programmer and suddenly everything is just a whole lot easier. Thanks to his incredible programming prowess, he was able to move all the forum databases into the new software. I then emailed all the users their new passwords.
So far, everything seems to be working fine. So with that success under our belt, I went in search of an ASP-based blog. I’ve been using WordPress (more PHP software), and truth be told, I really hate it. All the online big wigs seem to think it’s great. Call me a rebel, but I think it’s slow, buggy, and a giant pain to use. When I set it up, customizing the look made me tear out my hair and the end result was still kind of ugly.
So the big moment today when I got my blog database all set up on my computer and entered a test posting in the new software means that our blog will probably be moved to the new software and I can say a final buh bye to PHP forever. Yay!