SameOldSchmidt

You may want to take a last look at Dead Lantern, because later tonight I’m going to obliterate the whole site and remake it using WordPress, somewhat similarly to what I did with my blog here.  A responsible professional would set up an isolated test site and get all the details hammered out before doing the conversion, but I’m feeling lucky so I’m just gonna nuke it and then make things up as I go along.

Like this site, I had originally coded Dead Lantern totally from scratch.  I was proud of it, and it worked pretty well for our purposes.  Definitely quick and streamlined compared to some of the complex features in a package like WordPress.  The DL users will have to get used to a somewhat slower experience when they post, and maybe the pages will load a bit slower (but we’re talking milliseconds).

I think it’s the right thing to do for the site.  Dead Lantern is a great site and our small crew is awesome, and we do have a nice little following (shout-outs to all the Splattercast listeners!) but I can’t deny that other sites have better blogging features and DL ends up looking a little amateurish in certain spots.

I can’t cling to my simplistic yet lovingly-crafted code forever, I need to move DL into the modern era with reader comments, easy uploads for the posters, permalinks, RSS and all that other junk that people expect from a modern site.

This entry was posted by Jeff on Friday, September 14th, 2007 at 12:46 pm and is filed under Dead Lantern. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.