The Kyle File's face lift is now complete, and all features are implemented. Reading and following my posts about all kinds of subjects is now easier than ever, and it is even easier for me to post all kinds of random ramblings to this nice little webspace. Although the most noticeable changes appear to be cosmetic, I am now making full use of a self-hosted WordPress installation on my own VPS, complete with plugins that have imported every post I ever made to my TumbleLog, automatically publishes my posts to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, with more to come in the future hopefully, and even keeps the same Feedburner subscription link I had. The most important changes I am introducing include the much more flexible and nicer-looking theme, the software freedom that comes from using free and open source code and the killer WordPress Android app, which works extremely well with Talkback on Gingerbread and up, and makes writing blog posts from my phone almost as easy as texting. Oh, and I guess I should mention that it isn’t in any way owned or controlled by Yahoo, or even Google, with the exception of the Feedburner feed, which I could replace at any time. I have also added some additional quick share buttons, and the ability to “love” or “hate” my posts, which is something that I almost had on Tumblr, but has been reimplemented and improved here. Enjoy my better blog, and don’t hesitate to let me know what you think of me or my posts in the comments or with the “love it!” and “hate it!” buttons. And as always, feel free to rip anything you like and call it yours, as my original posts are still in the public domain as always.
So I've been playing around with Wordpress off and on for a couple of years in a rather half-hearted attempt to move my blog from Tumblr to my own VPS. Well, I finally started playing with it seriously over the last couple of days, and found that I was able to import all my posts into my new blog, which is now hosted on my own DigitalOcean VPS. After taking care of some theming and plugin customizations and rewriting my pages, I feel like The Kyle File powered by Wordpress is now ready to see the light of day. I have completed the migration of the domain name's DNS settings and edited the Feedburner details for the feed, so everything should just work mostly as it always did. Please note that if you have been following me on Tumblr, I will make every attempt to keep it updated as well, so my posts will still show up on your dashboard. However, thekyle.tk* will always bring you to my shiny new blog powered by Wordpress.
It didn’t quite work. TweaK returns two links. The good news is I think I can fix it by making a wrapper API that will only return the first link. A search indicates that someone already did it, but I can’t find the source code for the script, and I want to be able to release the code into the public domain, which means I’ll be doing it myself. Looks like it won’t be too hard, but until it’s done, if you see a pair of my links on Twitter or StatusNet and you want to click it, just click the first one that looks like bcd34.tk. The second one that looks like tk./bcd34 doesn’t seem to work.
In other news, since before the upgrade of StatusNet, my blog posts haven’t been reaching Identi.ca. I hope they get that fixed soon. I can’t seem to figure out where the problem is though, so I plan to eventually migrate this blog to Wordpress, of course hosted at HostingPad, so that I can just install plugins rather than dealing with all kinds of third parties to share my posts across my social networks.
Update
The TweaK API has been replaced by Freenom's Random Domains API, allowing for 5 times the domains, and therefore 5 times the available short links. Links to tweak.tk are broken, preserved for archival purposes only.
Doing a little experimentation with WordPress. Logged into the admin section for the first time. OMG! This thing actually says "Howdy, kyle" LOL.