Those who have been keeping up with me and my website since the beginning (which, I’m pretty sure there are very few of you) know that once in a while, I decide to do a massive overhaul of my website. After my huge redesign back in May of 2010, I was pretty satisfied with my what I made, and my website’s physical appearance has changed minimally throughout the past two years. There have been some significant back-end changes, but the front-end essentially looked the same except for the occasional new module and different background.

I felt that now would be a good time to do another huge change to my website for a handful of reasons. The main reason for this timing is that I’m on summer break now from university, and have not yet started my summer transfer courses at college. This gives me a relatively larger amount of free time to get everything done as quickly as possible. On top of that, I’ve been doing a lot of discouraging and frustrating programming work for the Badger Herald, which is my university-related work, and I needed a break from that to program something fun for my own website.

As for the actual motivation for this change, I’ve been wanting to make a change like this to my website for a long time now because the way I had my website set up before before was not very dynamic and efficient, and it was time-consuming to make changes.

So by now you’re probably wondering, what exactly is the change? Previously, my website was made out of pure PHP, HTML, CSS, and Javascript code. If I wanted to edit a page or post a new article or blog entry, I would use a template and code it up, then upload it to my website. Then, I would have to manually update the RSS feed and the XML sitemap. This sounds like a hassle, but I had my coding environment set up so it could be done relatively quickly.

The bad part about this set-up was that it was too localized within articles. If I wanted to make a universal change, it would be nearly impossible, and I would either have to go through each page individually, or at the very least, I would have to go through each section or category individually. Thus, even if I wanted to add new features (such as previous and next buttons), I wouldn’t be able to easily put it into effect for my entire website.

After this update, I’ll be able to do what I couldn’t before relatively easily, because I am now using a pre-made content management system called WordPress. It probably sounds familiar to a lot of you, because WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms. The difference between other WordPress blogs you might see and my installation of WordPress is that it’s hosted on my own server (my friend’s, if you want to get technical, but it’s on my hosting account on his server), and it’s extremely customized.

Before initiating the change, I already finished coding up the design, which is why the finalized aesthetic version of Parkzer.com got released so soon. It’s almost the same as it was before, but with a few differences related to the functioning of WordPress.

Now that the core of the conversion is done, I have to transfer all of the individual pages manually over to WordPress. There are an estimated 800 unique pages that I have to hand-transfer by copying and pasting content and trimming out unnecessary pre- and post-scripts.

Fortunately, after I transfer everything over, all my website’s content will be in a nice, parsed format stored in a database rather than in 800 individual text files, so I will never have to do a mass migration of this scale ever again. Meanwhile, I still have to get through a lot of content. My hopeful completion date is within the next week or so, but at the rate that I’m going, I don’t think that will be a viable deadline. I am literally taking every opportunity I can to transfer pages, so hopefully I will be able to get everything tidied up before the end of the month.

During the migration process, you might notice an abnormally high number of 404 errors, which are page not found errors. That most likely means that I haven’t gotten around to transferring that file yet. The order in which I am transferring files is based off popularity as stated by Google Analytics; my most frequently visited pages will be transferred first, and my least frequently visited pages will be transferred last.