You may have noticed that things look a little different around here…

Well, that’s because I’ve migrated from Pixelpost as my site’s backend to WordPress. Why would I do this? Mainly because Pixelpost seems like a dying platform. The last update came out in September 2009–an eternity in web software release cycles. No one seemed to be doing any active development on it anymore and the plugins available for it were scanty, whereas WordPress is one of the world’s most popular and actively-developed blogging/CMS platforms with literally thousands and thousands of plugins and extensions available and new versions of the software being released regularly.

The migration itself was semi-difficult, as I’d already migrated from a home-grown photoblogging platform that I’d written to Pixelpost a couple of years ago (when it was still an active platform) and wanted to avoid some of the problems that I had the first time around. These included (because Pixelpost has no import functionality–a serious oversight) losing all of my comments and having to manually upload each photo and write a description and categorize it. Two or so years ago this wasn’t trivial, but at least my photoblog only had 600-700 photos on it. Fast-forward two years and I’ve got nearly 1300 photos, which would’ve been a serious time-sink to reupload to my WordPress instance. The great thing about WordPress, though, is that it has an import system to import blogs, so I knew I could leverage this. The bad part? Pixelpost, in a huge oversight, has no export functionality. So, strapping on my day job as an app developer, I wrote a piece of software to extract the data from Pixelpost and reformat it into WordPress import format. Then I simply imported it, tricking WordPress into thinking it was importing from another WordPress blog. Plus, it brought over all my comments and categories.

So far, I really like WordPress as a back-end, with a few exceptions, the major one of which is that with Pixelpost, I had a plugin for Adobe Lightroom that would let me export my photos directly from Lightroom to LeftyRodriguez.Com. But, really, that’s not a huge deal.

Anyhow, I hope that you will like the new site. The interface is cleaner, the pictures are larger and the platform is strong.

Thank you for your patronage!