Welcome to The Grapevine, the new name for my blog, formerly called The News Desk. You can now access my blog directly from blog.adonline.id.au and if you do, you’ll very quickly notice many exciting new features, as promised.

I have spent any spare time these past few weeks slowly migrating four years of blog posts from CuteNews to WordPress, which is the software underpinning the blog. Despite the tedious work in setting this up, I am so far very happy with the outcome.

Why the change?

Wordpress has much better back-end support than CuteNews, so posting articles is considerably easier for me compared to when I was using CuteNews.

Furthermore, WordPress permits much greater functionality, such as incorporating comments from users. I had been using CuteNews since 2003, but I was never able to get the comments feature to work properly, nor did the RSS feeds cope with the mod_rewrite function used to simplify the URLs. In the end, it was all becoming a bit of a mess. With the rise of RSS technology, change just became inevitable.

One of the best features of WordPress is it’s use of a MySQL database that underpins The Grapevine, making the website much richer for end-users.

The evolution: How did we get to this?

I started “blogging” not long after I established my website a.d.online back in 1998. Of course it was not called blogging then, but just “publishing” I guess. I had a section on my website called the Political Eye where I posted occasional rants on political matters. Everything was hand-coded in HTML as that was all I had access to. That unsustainable concept eventually fell in a heap and so in 2003 the News Desk was born, with a much broader scope than the Political Eye ever had.

The old News Desk represented my first foray into PHP. Fast forward to 2007 and most of my website now incorporates PHP to some degree, either as includes in HTML coding or as the basis of the website (such as is the case for Photologium.com). In 2003, PHP was a major advance for me but now MySQL databasing represents the new frontier in 2007/8.

Similar to the Political Eye, the confines of the News Desk eventually became an issue. Initially I was keen just to publish articles with minimal feedback. If a reader wanted to comment, he or she could email me. But now I write on such broad matters, and the internet has evolved such that I want this to be interactive. And in recognition of that, I am now formally calling this a “blog”. (The News Desk was always described as “not quite a blog but close enough”). People don’t want to compose an email just to say “I agree/disagree with your article” when a quick comment will do.

WordPress was the obvious choice with its popularity and massive functionality.

In particular, I have to acknowledge the use of these especially useful features (amongst many):

• Mike Smullin’s Ajax Comments,
• John Godley’s Filled In, permitting CAPTCHA support on comments,
• Matt Mullenweg’s Akismet, and
• Jamis Charles’ invaluable code permitting headlines to be shown on my main website (which uses a different domain).

I hope you enjoy The Grapevine. I believe the new name represents a new era.

The next task is to modernise the design of my main website… but all in good time.

Happy reading (and commenting!)