Jacky Yong

Behold, the new Jackyyong has arrived! Like it?

Let me brief you over the changes that happened. The major overhaul that I braved through was the entire underlying backbone; it is now running on WordPress instead of Drupal! You the readers might not feel any difference, but let me tell you, the change is immediately felt by yours truly here. Gone are the drape and boring arrangements of Garland and other blocky Drupal themes. WordPress themes are more livelier, vibrant, relevant. Can’t really blame Drupal there, WordPress is made for bloggers, Drupal on the other hand is more for professional sites like news site or some other major corporations.

Then there is the blogroll. They are basically sites of my friends that I would like to keep close to me. Correct me if I am wrong, but I can’t seem to find it in Drupal without an extra plugin download. Goldfries has this great Random Blogroll and Random Post plugin that can be used immediately in WordPress. Check out my side bar on the left. Thanks a lot Goldfries!

Another thing that annoys me is the absence of a proper comment management module in Drupal. If you wan, you can always download it, but why can’t it be built-in like the WordPress? I am getting a hell lot of spam comments in my Drupal, and by using WordPress, I am hoping to eliminate them.

IN YOUR FACE SPAMMERS!! Let’s see you get through me now. In case you are still not getting my message to you, I DO NOT need any more penis enhancing drug or some free credit card in Canada. Fuck you!

Initially my transition to WordPress was a bit reluctant. I can’t find an equivalent theme by SEOPosition that I use in my previous Drupal site. After almost a week’s Google, I bumped into Simpress v2 by Dezinerfolio.com, my current theme in my debut WordPress website. Just one look at it and I immediately fell in love with it! That’s when I realized that my vision of migrating over to WordPress will finally come true!

The migration process wasn’t easy. I found a lot of write ups on how to migrate over from Drupal to WordPress using SQL statements in myPHPAdmin, but those were too complicated, and most of the fields are no longer relevant. I am an ex-IT guy, I do .NET and MS SQL for a better half of my working life. But rather than spending time perusing over the SQL statements, which I am sure I can, I went the hard way: copy and paste! Took a long time, but all 49 older posts were finally ported over late last night. Phew. Now I will need to retire my friendster blog and my older Drupal site, and route the traffic over.

I feel that I need to pay a homage to my previous blogs before I finally shut them down for good. So here are some screen shots:

Friendster blog was my earliest foray into the world of blogging:

I do not really have a screen shot of the first version of Jackyyong using the Ubuiquity theme, but I still have it in photos.jackyyong.com, so here’s a rough screenshot of it:

Instead of that logo of a camera, I have the jester logo, and the letter J to represent my name:

Then came version 2. I hated Ubuity because of its sharp contrasting colour, not suitable for a blog, IMHO. That’s when SEOPosition’s theme came into picture. I loved it, and it was, in my opinion, the best theme a Drupal can get.

Tell me what you think. Meanwhile there are still a lot of work to be done. I have just drawn that logo specifically for this new theme, but I need to also migrate photos.jackyyong.com over. Then there is the tonnes of dead links that I need to verify too …. *sigh…*