WordPress

Every couple of years my personal web presence gets a major overhaul. This time it took a little longer, meaning wolfpaulus.com had the same look and feel for quite some time now and I had to use WayBack machine at http://web.archive.org/ to find out for how long …

This time to focus of the upgrade was mainly to make content creation and syndication easier but it also resulted in what I think is great look and feel. If you happen to read this in an RSS feed reader, I encourage you to go to http://wolfpaulus.com and take look.

Content Creation

Until now, I had rolled my own PHP driven content management and syndication system; a simple file based system that was looking for some proprietary tags in the text content. Building your own system certainly has a lot of advantages and I also learned a lot developing and running it. However, eventually I spent too much time in the PHP, time I would rather use to add content to this site.

Looking at all the available options, I ended up with WordPress. Instead of going directly to http://wordpress.com/, I’m running WordPress 3.0 at Arvixe, my web hosting provider, giving my at least the sense of being in control.

Using WordPress opens the door to a multitude of tools, supporting writing, editing, publishing, and syndicating.

Look and Feel

Some time back, all WordPress based sites looked pretty much the same. Not anymore, ever since professional theme creators got into the business of selling WordPress Themes, sites became more distinguishable and way more attractive.

Content Features

All the relevant content has been transferred over from the file based system into WordPress. However, all Permalinks changed. Recently added QR Codes are also available on the new site as is a great printing feature, allowing not only to conveniently print and preview but also to tweet, email, and convert into PDF.

I don’t know yet how useful the the display of recent tweets and the TagClout really are, but it certainly looks cool.

Browsing wolfpaulus.com with a Droid

Mobile Clients get special treatment

For the best possible experience, when visiting the site with a mobile client, like your Android or iPhone, a specially tailored Theme is used, showing content beautifully. It scales images, captions and videos automatically. Breaks up content with ‘Load More’ links that use ajax to make browsing snappy. However, there is also an easy way to get to the regularly formatted site, when visiting with your

Feedback

WordPress also has a great and easy to use feedback system and there are plugins that filter out spam automatically.

So if you like the new site and even if you don’t, why not leave a brief reply below.