Quick update on my transition to WordPress… this has by far been the smoothest conversion between blog platforms. (By comparison, converting from Radio to Movable Type took a couple of weeks of effort.) Some additional tweaks I’ve added since last night:
- Now reading plugin. Lets me identify what book I’m currently reading, links to Amazon.com (even uses my affiliate link, so if you buy the book I’ll get a few pennies for the effort) and gives me the ability to review books after I’m done.
- WordPress Netflix plugin. Identifies the movies that are currently at home by querying Netflix and then using the cover images from Amazon.com.
- Last.fm. A little javascript lets you see what artists I’ve been listening to the most this week. (Last.fm works by plugging into iTunes; as I listen to music, it’s streamed up to last.fm.)
One other thing I did was to change how I use Google AdSense on the blog; while it’s still too early to read too much into the impact, changing the presentation of the ads and better integrating them into the page layout seems to have had a nice effect on click-throughs.
For site measurement, I’ve switched from using Sitemeter to using BlogBeat. The way BlogBeat presents blog data to me is far more intuitive than Sitemeter; I always had trouble getting much use out of Sitemeter beyond seeing raw visitors and page view data. Blogbeat understands blogs, which means that it can tell me which searches drove the most traffic to which posts, which posts received the most comments, etc.
As for my impressions of WordPress so far? It’s fast, elegant, and it was exceedingly easy to get up to speed. So far, so good.