On June 9, all the pooh phahs from the Ultra Wide Band world are going to get together in Boston and are going to talk about everything concerning this new technology. Bunch of companies will be showing off their products, many of them at mostly development stage. Those in attendance will include Intel, Freescale Semiconductor (a subsidiary of Motorola), Texas Instruments, Staccato Communications, Wisair, Mercedes Benz (SARA Group), Ubisense, Sensors & Software, Philips, HP, Samsung, Aether Wire & Location, Memsen Corp., Alereon, the MBOA, and the UWB Forum.

Ranjeet asked the question, why Word Press? Actually Pankaj did a nice round-up of my trials and tribulations. You can read it here. Anyway I can give you reasons – first of all I will always remember MT with certain fondness, and had it not been for recent server problems, I would have never switched.

Now Expression Engine was my first choice, and infact I had a template and site ready to go. I decided to hold off on EE for two reasons – my webhosting company was not optimized for EE and there were some limitations on the MySQL data and access. Anyway as I had said earlier, it seemed a bit of an overkill for this site. But the most pressing reason why I went with Word Press was because it was relatively simple and easy for me to install. More than anything, I really need to lick this problem this weekend because the opportunity costs of outages are too high. I had gone through all sort of help-desk support at the hosting company and with Six Apart, but we could not figure out the root cause of the site problems.

The 45 Minute MakeOver

I started with a brand new database. I simply took the MT template, and matched up the key tags. First thing I did was copy-and-pasted the MT style-sheet to Word Press default style sheet, called wp-layout.css. Next up, I convered the header, doc type, footer and all other fixed elements of the site, to include files and added the includes into the default index template. I got rid of all the typical WP tags like META and removed the annoying list tags that the default ships with. Once I got the look right, I moved things around: Login right at the top, and then search and of course the book and google ad includes. Pankaj helped me with the drop downs. The code for this came from the Word Press support forum.

That’s it for the look and feel. I moved the index.php file from the word press folder to the root of the site, made a tiny mod in the index page to reflect that (it cost me edit this ability but that’s all right!). Next up, I uploaded the MT-export file as “import.txt” to the admin folder, made one small change to the import-mt.php file, and within 30 seconds all 1400 entries were in the site. Pankaj taught me how to make a htacccess file to include a redirect that moved index.xml feed to the new rss URL. Here I also included the code to generate clean archives. Uploaded it to the site, got rid of the .txt extension and added a “.” before the name. That’s it. The entire switch took 45 minutes. I did exactly the same for NRI and VoIPDaily. Mostly copy and paste.

Final thoughts: I am loving it! But for VoIPDaily and Tablatronic.Net, which are both going to be community driven interactive publications (less blog like) with forums and mailing lists etc, I am going to go with Expression Engine. Those are more “online magazines” and nothing is better than EE for those purposes. What about MT? Well the last time I tried to install MT, it was a tedious process, though since then I have mastered it. It still is a better product if you tend to use desktop blogging clients. Those are serious issues with WP/EE. I am told there is an Ecto patch, but I cannot get it going, and well, will wait for that to show up in the next release of the software.

Some bloglines subscribers are having problems with the RSS feed. Here is an – optional URL

Bluetooth’s Newest Rival is a technology called, Near Field Communications (NFC) which is currently being used for e-payments and small-scale data transfers of up to 1 Mbit/sec over a few feet.

Users touch two NFC devices to establish a link, which gets round complex addressing problems. Putting devices close together is good enough, but proponents believe touching will come more naturally to people. NFC is already used in Radio Frequency Identification devices (RFID), employed increasingly for ’smart’ product tags in shops and for etickets. (Personal Computer World.)

My take: interesting concept, though I am not quite sure why one would need yet another bit of PAN technology. Finally Bluetooth is getting embedded in cars, cell phones and hopefully in some consumer devices. This is good penetration and hopefully more people will add support for the PAN technology.

Bluetooth folks, have to get their act together and make the technology simpler and easier to use. Maybe Apple should be running the Bluetooth stuff.

24 hours into using WordPress, all I can say, I am impressed. But there seem to be a few pressing issues and I am issuing an open casting call for help. He/She who helps, will get a $25 shopping spree at Amazon.com. I can send you the requisite files if you are up for the challenge. Here is what I need:

1. Matt’s Asides implemented on my weblog.
2. The comments & track-backs section to look nice and clean. It looks kind of amateurish right now.
3. Redirect all old MT entries to the new entries in WP.
4. Incorporate “My I Tunes” Play List in WP Index File.
5. A links page like this.

Also wondering if anyone can tell me why I cannot connect to GigaOM using Safari browser. I can connect using any other broswer. If that is a problem anyone else is facing, drop me a line or if possible, please let me know how to get around this.

So after many little experiments and changes, GigaOM has been Word Pressed. I tried using Moveable Type 3.0 but somehow the bugs in the system never really went away. My switch is not as religious as some others such as Mark Pilgrim. I just could not deal with the server errors and was worried about not being able to post on a regular basis.

Much of the switch went smoothly, even though about 60 odd posts have not been imported, but that’s all right, for I can do cut-and-paste and get everything into the Word Press database. I have also left the old files intact, just in case some one comes looking for them. Given that I am not much of a CSS guy, I cannot figure out why the hell the single listing page breaksdown like the way it does. Any one have ideas?

I switched all three weblogs – GigaOM, Not Really Indian and VoIPDaily – in less than 30 minutes. I admit I had some help from Pankaj, but it was more or less learn as you go kind of an experience. I managed to port everything to the old skin and have retained much of the look and feel of the MT-powered site. In addition, using some hacks I managed to retain the URL of the old RSS feed so there will be no disruptions at all. I am sure, there will be more bugs, but so far everything is working smoothly.

My initial impression – Word Press is very fast, nimble and is light weight. I see the bandwidth consumption is down, and so are the MySQL resources. The size of the overall site is smaller. What I don’t like? Well I cannot post from Net News Wire or Ecto or W.Bloggar. That truly is the biggest short coming of Word Press, but I am told that it will eventually be worked out. My single listing page seems to be breaking down for some odd reason, and since I am no CSS guru, I have no clue why that is happening. Anyone have tips for me?

Why and how I got to Word Press?