3 months of .NET, PHP and a new job in Portland.

Has it really been 3 months? Yeah, I guess it has; almost. It’s been crazy, really crazy. I have been busier at work than I have in almost 2 years, which in this case was long overdue and much needed. I’ve been spending my days converting a custom .NET site to run on the WordPress blogging platform, which quite honestly was much easier than I anticipated. In fact, when I started the project, I thought  that it would take me about twice as long as it did. I thought for sure that it would take me longer to make the site functionality work in PHP than it did for me to originally build it out using .NET. It didn’t. It was almost twice as fast, and I built the site out totally twice, using 3 different templates, and completely redesigned in about half way through the project. The most difficult parts were getting everything to work right under IIS 6, and finding the right plugin to replicate things like event listings and polls.

Getting WordPress to run under IIS is a post all unto itself, especially IIS 6, but it runs quite smoothly now, and the biggest snafu in the whole thing is read/write permissions. There’s also a new glitch in WordPress 3.1 and IIS that creates an endless loop redirect for the blog site, but not for the admin section (thankfully). there is a plugin fix, and it works perfectly – so if you’re upgrading to 3.1 and running on IIS, I would have the Permalink Fix & Disable Canonical Redirects Pack ready to go. Check the site out in a couple of weeks, once it is live at ZippoEncore.com.

Honestly, this has been one of the most interesting and rewarding projects that I worked on in the nearly 8.5 years that I was the web designer for Zippo. The Zippo Encore project has been a lot of fun incorporating so many different elements on the site. From building in various social plugins like Tweet and the Facebook like box, getting to design wallpapers for desktops to iPads, and building out custom Flash image loaders so I could have my precious rounded corners on all of the CMS controlled images. This was a great project to end on.

That brings me to the moving bit doesn’t it? Yep, I guess it does. So yeah, in 3 days I will be packing all my shit in my car and heading West; back to Portland. It’s been an interesting 8.5 years here in Bradford, PA, and while I can’t say that I’m going to miss the town, I will miss my friends – who will always have an open invitation to stay at my place in Portland.

For now, I think that’s all I’m going to prattle on about, if you want to see my most likely route, check it out on Google Maps, and feel free to check back as I post from various locations over the next week. I think I better start keeping an eye on the weather…..

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