Profiles

Music performance, songwriting, organizing and hosting of monthly songwriting workshops, public speaking, travel, photography, book clubs. Founder and co-host of the Song Talk Radio Podcast & Radio Show on 1280AM Toronto

Back in 2004, I was re-building my bands (The Parkdale Hookers website. I’d created lots of websites for clients as static HTML pages. I knew that if the updating process on the new site was too demanding, the site would become out of date after a while. I had seen that happen on too many client sites.

I thought about what would be required: a simple site, database driven that would have new content displayed on the front page. Realizing a blog engine would fit the bill, I already knew that Blogger was hard to customize, I started to look around. I tried Joomla, but that would only output table-based output and I had long moved over to CSS-based coding – to the point where I couldn’t really remember how to do table-based layouts – I also knew I’d never go back.

I found WordPress and installed it. There were very few resources on the web at the time (figuring out how to create multiple loops on the front page was a challenge) but I was thrilled with the result. The next couple of updates broke lots of stuff as old calls were removed (gettext anyone?) – which worried me. But it settled down after a bit.

After that, I’ve never looked back!