As I already explained previously, on April 5th (2010), I migrated pixelyzed.com from another blogging platform to WordPress. Last night I changed from the free theme I’d been using to my own new design which I integrated into WordPress using the Thesis theme (more about Thesis below).
Why Pixelyzed.com Is Now Running on WordPress
Last night, I started the process of migrating pixelyzed.com from a hybrid static and blog site which ran under blogCFC to a full blogging site entirely powered by WordPress (and PHP). As a long time ColdFusion developer and advocate, this is a huge change for me. It is a decision I did not take lightly but it was long time coming and was motivated by several reasons.
The Fireworks Team is Now Blogging
You can now find the Fireworks team’s new blog here : http://blogs.adobe.com/fireworks That’s a great thing for improving Fireworks’ visibility and hopefully it will be updated regularly.
On the other hand, I wonder why Adobe is not using a ColdFusion based solution for blogging. I really think they should be using their own platforms as much as possible. They could be using an existing blogging application like BlogCFC which I’m using here or build their own (which they could sell or give away, integrate into Dreamweaver, etc). The possibilities are mind boggling and I wonder why the primary Web building software supplier is still not helping their customers build blogs using their own platforms and software?
But I digress… 😉 Do check out the Fireworks teams’s blog!
Testing Windows Live Writer (2nd try)
I just installed and am now testing a nifty little app called Windows Live Writer which is used to write to your blog through XML-RPC from your computer without the need to log into your blog’s admin area.
Among the benefits of using such an app, you can save post drafts locally and have access to more sophisticated formatting options. I already had that since I was using FCKEditor in my blog’s admin area but Live Writer also adds spell checking which I didn’t have. In any case, FCKEditor did not work in Opera 9.2 which is my favorite browser these days (Firefox is just too slow on my aging machine but that will change soon… more on that later 😉
Live Writer is just a cool little lightweight app that I can leave open for hours without my Web session timing out and which can automatically save drafts at timed intervals like most text editors can do.
For fellow BlogCFC users, you can look at this post from Ray Camden which links to this post from Dan Vega to get a step by step of how to set Live Writer for BlogCFC.
Update: Just an addition to test Live Writer’s ability to update an existing blog post.
Update 2: Updating seems to be working fine…
Going Forward with this Blog…
Anyway, enough of the criticism for now. I really didn’t mean for my first comments on CS3 to be critical but this suites packaging issue has been bothering many people and I wanted to address it.
I’ll soon post more about the new apps in CS3 themselves and explain why I think this is one of the best upgrades ever for many of the applications. As for Fireworks specifically, a lot of groundwork has been done in terms of integration that will pay off in the future, but the Fireworks team has managed to deliver very compelling new functionality as well. More on that later.
Also, you have probably noticed that the look of pixellog has gone back to normal. As I expected, going from the default BlogCFC template to the pixelyzed.com look has been far easier than doing the same with BlogFusion had been. I really have to give kudos to Ray Camden for the incredible work he has done on BlogCFC since the 3.x version. I also updated the software from version 5.6 to 5.7 yesterday and the process was quite easy. I’m very happy I have switched back.
In the next few weeks you may encounter errors when accessing pixellog as I work on moving it from an Access database to MySQL. I’ve struggled quite a bit with this so far but I’m working with my hosting company to resolve what are probably my errors. I’m usually good with the technical side of Web design but this MySQL thing has not been easy for me so far…
So, see you later to discuss Fireworks CS3 and other CS3 apps!
