The Wease DIY Experience

Back in the day (2003) I published static HTML pages as my blog using iblog (www.lifli.com/). This sucked. Then I heard of blogger, which was in its infancy, so I jumped ship and had it publish to my FG server by ftp. I was loving it, but soon found it limiting. Then I heard of wordpress. The concept I liked. Content was stored in a database, page queries where rendered by retrieving the correct content, then running it through the theme files to produce a page (called server side scripts). Fiends at the time were building big custom sites and said this was the way of the future. So I jumped ship, and imported the Blogger content to Wordpress. It was a surprisingly smooth transition once I configured learned how to configure wordpress (in total about 4 days worth of work).

After switching to wordpress, I was digging it. I had to learn a bit about MySQL (database) and PHP (server side scripts) to set it up and customize it, but I was handling things just fine being born a geek. I was also loving the FAlbum plugin that integrated my flickr account into the wordpress blog. It was pretty seamless. For the full set up I used at the time see: http://www.fearlessgearless.com/set-up

Then around 2005 I was hitting a wall with what I wanted to do with with my site. For example I wanted a bike repair wiki and an event calendar. I also liked the idea of doing all my photos in house rather than flickr (at the time I was uncertain about the longevity of flickr) since at the time flickr didn't allow you to nest albums and I wanted a series of critical mass albums to be easily accessible.

The first step into my undoing, was using gallery2 web app for images and using the wordpress plugin to tie the two together. So far so good, bye bye flickr. Then I added a calendar app in a subdirectory and themed it to look like my site so I could have events. Then I had to modify my theme to show upcoming events using an iframe.

I soon came to realize that this patch work approach was quickly getting out of hand. I wanted one web app at that could do it all. Enter Drupal (drupal.org).

It has a very flexible architecture (aka the node), massive amounts of community modules (similar to wordpress plugins) and as I would find out a completely unwieldy beast out of the box. I figured I could tame it, lured in by its promises of being able to do anything. To learn I tried to turn FG into more of a community site, but failed because my drupal skills were lacking at the time. People need simple and usable. It was not.

In addition, one of Drupal's major drawbacks is there are not many pre-fabed themes available. My site was ugly, this also discourages people. We all still judge quality largely on looks. As near as I can figure, most drupal sites are for large projects with funding, as such ppl pay $1000's for a custom theme so there is little need for free community themes. Wordpress on the other hand is more of a hobbiest web app and as such has more free beautiful themes available than you can shake a stick at.

After the failure with FG, I ended up volunteering at a small alternative transportation magazine to help the webmaster there (since I was beginning to understand drupal). I ended up taking over and designing a magazine publishing platform (www.momenumplanet.com) - for free - since no one else would and I liked the idea that bikes should rule the earth. The site is now quite far along, but unfinished (I do this as a volunteer) but it is a strong proof of concept. It just needs some finishing (aka the theme). That said, I have built in some amazing features like the ability to track every photo that appears in an article and tie it to the contributor (e.g. http://www.momentumplanet.com/contributor/amy-walker). However their needs are quickly outgrowing what I can do for them in my spare time.

While working on momentum, I basically left FG to rot because drupal was so much work and I lost most of my readership in that time (I used to have 60-200 ppl on line concurrently at any point, now maybe 10-15). Recently, however I have started turning my attentions back to my blog and soon I think I will have the ultimate blogging machine. For example, I recently duplicated a lot of flickr's functioning (see www.fearlessgearless.com/photo ) so I have ditched gallery2 and I am in the midst of importing the albums, which is surprisingly straight forward . Soon I will be releasing albums by google maps (sneak peak: www.fearlessgearless.com/photo/map) to give you an idea of what can be done with drupal. Next I will be rebuilding my linkage section (I will link your blog of course), and finally start working on that maintenance handbook I have dreamed of. FYI the linkage section, waited until I learned how to theme a specific "view" in drupal, as the default link view was hideous, now I have a nice compact form.

Ultimately, I am fine with the set backs, because I wanted FG to be a bike project you judge in 20-30 yrs time, so everything has to be in house to ensure it has the best chance of being futureproof. I am building for the future as they say. However, that all said posting on drupal is still harder than wordpress, and wordpress is harder than blogger.

So the moral of the story:

1) Write out EXACTLY what you want to do ahead of time. For example, you need to explicitly state what do you hope to accomplish. "Master plan of world-wide bicycle domination," is rather vague and as a result you could wander around in technical issues like I did. Specifically, try writing out a 5 year plan. If you don't see yourself writing in 5 years, then stick with blogger and ride you bike with your spare time. What ever you do, don't just jump ship for fun unless you are prepared for the consequences.

2) Once you know what your needs are, choosing the write blogging app is straight forward.
Drupal is overkill for 99% of projects, A) unless you want to build big, B) are exceptionally skilled at web development or C) have the money to pay the experts to do it for you. Developing drupal is more of a job than a hobby.
Wordpress is probably one of best pre-configured, ease of use server side blogging apps out there.
Blogger set up even quicker that wordpress to set up but less flexible.

3) For most bloggers+ (i.e. beyond google's blogger), I suggest the wordpress + flickr pro account combo. It is a nice compromise between usability, functionality and flexibility (if you smartly tag your work)

4) If I ever do Drupal development again I will charge a minimum of $50/hr. I feel I have volunteered plenty for my karma in my next life.

Cheers