Apart from the addition of content, the site has undergone a lot of cosmetic changes, and has a new search system which is much better than the standard WordPress search.

In a nod towards the fact that the whole future of the internet seems to be based around social networking, each post contains a tinyurl, and buttons to share the content on the most popular social networks. From the front page, you can subscribe to the new johnonfood newsletter, and follow John on twitter.

Due to the fact that the site has been getting more and more traffic, there have also been a lot of changes to the backend to improve the speed at which the site runs. Static images are now offloaded to a CDN (Content Distribution Network), and the whole site is heavily cached to reduce the load on the server.

There are a lot more changes in the pipeline which will be appearing very soon indeed.

Now though, it is back online, on a new server, running on a new version of Worpress, and with a Simple:Press integration waiting in the wings.

I have rearranged my life to make a much more substantial amount of time available for working on this site, and it has become a part time job. If anyone is interested in advertising or sponsorship, please get in touch.

Other immediate differences are mainly css related, and are intended to make the posts prettier, and clearer to read, i.e. the semi-transparent captions added to the images in posts, and clearer sub-headings within the text.

Strangely it doesn’t seem to be that easy in reality, as the wordpress support forums have several posts asking how to achieve it.

There is a WordPress plugin that works very well and will do it for you, but sadly it doesn’t seem to work in WP2.6.

So, I decided to do it myself, and here is the code for anyone else wondering how to achieve it.

global $post;
$categories = get_the_category();
$category = $categories[0];
$cat_ID = $category->cat_ID;

The first problem was to move some comments over from the original blog on wordpress.com to this one. There might be a clever way to do this, but I don’t know what it is. Perhaps there is a wordpress plugin that I couldn’t find, or I guess that you could probably go into the database and add the comments into the appopriate table there.

As there were only a small number of comments to move over, I just added them as new comments, copying and pasting the original text, and author info, then logged in as admin and edited the timestamps on each one to be the same as the original.

Once everything was in one place, it was time to move to the new domain (and a new server at the same time). I couldn’t use the wordpress export and import tools from the admin, for a couple of reasons.

• The wordpress import doesn’t the categories and posts with the same id number as the original database and the theme that this site runs on has some hard coded category numbers. I didn’t want to run through the theme files and change all of these instances.
• The export/import doesn’t seem to import category descriptions. You could just copy and paste them afterwords, but it would be much easier not to have to.
• It took quite a while to get everything setup just the way that I want it in the admin interface, including all of the plugin settings, and I didn’t want to do all of that again. There is no option for importing/exporting these settings.

After a bit of thought, it seemed much easier to do an SQL dump from the old database, and then edit the database itself and import the SQL into an empty database on the new server.

I used a text editor to find and replace each instance of the sites relative and absolute URLs in the SQL file, and then uploaded it and created a wp-config file pointing to the new DB, and voila, all posts, categores with descriptions and settings exactly where they should be.

I also edited the .htaccess file at the old address to redirect everything here with a 301 permanent redirect. This is vital if you want to retain search engine ranking and traffic when moving domains.

In the last few days the whole site has undergone a few CSS changes to provide the light grey background behind the content areas. It makes everything stand out a lot more and seem more clear, especially the front page. The only worry is that it also makes it all look a bit like a BBC clone, but I think that it is distinct enough.

It seemed like a good idea to do some cleaning up and rearranging of the recipe posts while there still weren’t too many of them. They are looking much better with the addition of styled ingredients boxes, and the change for recipe steps from unordered <ul> to ordered <ol> lists.

There has also been a lot of bug fixing for Internet Explorer 6, and while it doesn’t all look perfect, nothing is actually broken anymore. I wish that we could just forget the existence of IE6 but far too many people are still using it.

The ‘About John’ page has been reworked, and some more content will be added there soon. Both that page and this one, are actually not WordPress ‘pages’ but are category archives with category specific templates. The text on the left half of the page is the category description, and the right half contains category posts.

Because this site is not yet fully public, I am duplicate posting at the moment both here and on the original wordpress.com blog.

Todays biggest addition is this dev blog, which will chart the development of the site. It is part of a general ‘pages redesign’ and forms part of the new ‘About the site’ page (which replaces ‘constant changing’). The ‘About John’ page is also seeing a makeover at the same time.

The previous site update posts have been added into this blog with the original timestamps to provide continuity.

I don’t currently have the time or equipment to take photos to accompany every post, but the visual impact of images on the site is huge. Not only does the image display in the individual post page, but also in different sizes, on the category archive and search pages, and on the front page for the most recent post in each category.

At the moment we are using stock royalty free images for the site, with the majority of them coming from stock.xchang

The result is this site, created using Wordprss 2.6 with the posts imported over from my existing blog, and it is currently living in a temporary place while I work on it and try to iron out some bugs.

I’m happy with the front page, and the rest is starting to come together as well, although there is a bit of CSS fiddling still to do.

My biggest problem is that I only have a Mac at home, and while everything looks fine to me in Safari, Firefox and Opera, and also looked ok in IE7 from an internet cafe this morning, I have no way to see how broken it all is in IE6 or earlier. If anyone has any comments on the layout or anything else then feel free to let me know.