Friday, August 31, 2007

Major Guitar Noize upgrade

Posted by Jon

Ellis Labs - Expression Engine
When I started Guitar Noize way way back in… erm June, I had one purpose in mind which was to help populate my new website GuitarLead.net which takes RSS feeds from various sites and aggregates them into one convenient Guitar News site. Well a couple of things changed within the first month of these sites being live. Firstly I really enjoyed posting new blog entries on Guitar Noize and secondly it started becoming quite popular. To date GuitarLead.net has only had a couple of thousand visitors which really suprised me because I use the site everyday to get updates on all the latest guitar news. But compare that figure to Guitar Noize which has had over 10,000 unique visitors since June 18th and you will see what I mean.

Anyway the point of this post is not to brag about my stats! Guitar Noize was set up in haste and I decided to use Blogger to publish posts as I have used this previously on another one of my sites Freaksauce however it has some serious limitations and it wasn’t long until I had realised that I had made an error in using Blogger. It offers very little in the way of customisation, and I don’t mean html/css I mean having custom server code in the templates. So I had to choose a new blogging platform and decided to give Expression Engine a go seeing as I already use their PHP Framework CodeIgniter for major application development. Now Expression Engine is great and was just the thing I needed to make a major Guitar Noize upgrade, front and back end. I now have pagination, something I can’t believe Blogger doesn’t have (at least in classic templates which you have to use if you publish to your own server via ftp) and Categories which I had been fudging in Blogger using labels. I also have integrated search instead of using a google search which is much cleaner. There are a million other enhancements which I can take full advantage of over time but for now I just want Guitar Noize up and running on the new platform.

The only problem is, and this is no fault of EE, my old url’s to posts are now going to be redundant as Expression Engine uses different urls to include categories and sub-categories. So for now I have left these old pages on my server with a url to the new page (in most cases) or to the new homepage. Also I have lost all the comments that had previously been made on the old site which sucks… Sorry for any inconvenience this causes but the drop in google rankings that I will no doubt experience in the short term is worth the long term benefits for the site.

Who would have thought that my strange infatuation with crazy guitar designs would become so popular!

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James on 08/31 at 06:43 PM

It may be possible to use some funky .htaccess redirects, I’ve just done it for my blog.

Is EE free? I always thought you had to pay.

Jon on 08/31 at 10:30 PM

Hi James, yes there is a free version of Expression Engine for non-commercial use such as blogs and for me it is a great way to get some use of a CMS that I understand the underlying framework seeing as it is, or used to be, Code Igniter. I could use htaccess redirects but I wanted the original posts to link to their new urls which is not so easy. If you have any ideas let me know!

Was that for Big Dumb Object?

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