Thinkcorps

Davenetics is the home of noted media and politics blogger Dave Pell. He needed a complete rebuild of his site, combining multiple blogs into one and adding a customized news aggregator.

I put together a highly customized install of Wordpress and then had to make sure that all old requests were being forwarded to the new pages. As part of this process, I hacked up a different Blogger to Wordpress import script, which retains the unique permalink structure that Blogger uses. There was lots more plugin-y goodness I created for Dave’s site, and I came to really appreciate the Wordpress architecture, which beyond any flaws it might have, makes an extremely worthwhile trade of efficiency for extensibility. It’s certainly not perfect, but it’s very nice.

Also part of this project was a news aggregator. I have built these myself in the past, using a separate Wordpress install as a base. This time, I chose to work off of RadGeek’s codebase, and tweak it in several ways that I like. I then added a few functions to customize the workings of the site, and a script to expire items from the database, since it’s not meant to be an archive of other people’s work anyway.