New Year’s Resolution accomplished One of my New Year’s Resolutions for 2025 was to move my blog away from WordPress.com. The reasons for that should be relatively obvious, but you can read my most recent article about it if you aren’t up on the latest shenanigans around Automattic and such. It’s a disappointing tale, to be sure. I had decided a few years ago that I was done futzing with new blogging platforms and was standardizing on WordPress....
Switching away from Substack is a hot topic right now, for reasons I won’t belabor here (hint: it’s because of the Nazis) – which means that people are searching for alternatives. One that’s getting tossed around is WordPress. As much as I’d love that to be true, the WordPress Newsletter functionality is not what most folks think of when you think “newsletter.”
WordPress turned 20 over the weekend. Older than that, if you count the b2 codebase WordPress forked from. 20 years for a project is quite an accomplishment, but WordPress hasn’t merely survived for 20 years. The open source CMS powers a huge chunk of the Internet and has shown how commerce and community can coexist successfully for the long haul. It’s hard to convey how impressive WordPress was when it was launched, if you haven’t dabbled with the CMSes of the time....
In case this helps anybody else, wanted to share how I created the Top 100 Albums page here on Dissociated Press. I wanted to be able to automagically create a page from all posts tagged with the “100 albums” tag, rather than manually laying things out. The final result is using the Display Posts plugin that lets you utilize a WordPress shortcode (" display-posts") with some parameters to specify how the posts should be displayed and how many of them should be displayed.
After coming back from Linux.conf.au last week (I stayed in Sydney an extra week for vacation) I noticed that the WordPress folks had released 2.1 while I was busy getting sunburned. I’ve upgraded my blog to 2.1 and all went well. Definitely worth a look if you’re the blogging type. I’ve got a review up on Linux.com. This release includes a couple of nice improvements — nothing Earth-shattering, but some nice stuff, nonetheless....
I started this blog in 2004, with WordPress 1.0. The domain is older than that, I ran Dissociated Press using a few other blogging tools, like phpWebLog, Slash, and (briefly) Blosxom, but WordPress is the only tool that I’ve been consistently happy with. (Which is not to say that it’s perfect or anything, but it’s been very, very good.) The WordPress folks released WordPress 2.0 last month, and I’m pretty impressed with the new features and improvements....