Lance Good

Wow, I haven't posted here in a long time.  So surely no one is reading at this point.  In any case, just to help with my own scatterbrained records, I am now working at Google.

That's right.  I work at the office in Pittsburgh.  Maybe the best Google office there is.  It's been pretty awesome so far.  All the good stuff you've heard about Google is pretty much true.  I'm working on Google Shopping, aka Google Product Search, aka what used to be Froogle.  In particular, I work on the browsing related parts of the experience.  So if you do a fairly generic search on Google Shopping like digital camera, then you should see some controls to explore all the different kinds of digital cameras.  That's the kind of thing I'm working on.

I have switched over to a new site design!  I had been using a combination of really old hand coded HTML with a separate Nucleus installation for my blog.  I went through a bit of work to port everything to WordPress in the interim but never actually published that design.  I really wanted each of my pages to have the potential for a separate blog layout and corresponding feed.  So I wanted to just tag each post with a category and have it show up on the appropriate blog page on my site.  I couldn't figure out how to do that with WordPress, even looking through all the plugins.  I got kinda close, but it was still lacking in many ways.

Instead, I am now using Joomla.  It's a more generic content management system that seems to do more of what I want. I thought about writing something custom in Ruby on Rails or Django, but I didn't see much point to the extra effort.  Anyway, I now have a bunch of separate pages in blog format with their own feeds, at least, where it makes sense.  It's a little more work to do some things though.  For example, I don't have comments on the posts at the moment.  I have to install an extension to do that.  Haven't had time for that yet.  However, I love all the flexibility.  For example, this post shows up on the front page and in my blog.  That's exactly what I want.

Thankfully, my intermediate work on WordPress wasn't totally wasted.  It turns out that there is an open source tool to convert your Nucleus blog posts to WordPress.  There is also an extension to convert from WordPress to Joomla.  So I was able to use that two step process to easily import my old blog posts.  There doesn't seem to be an easy tool to do the importing directly from Nucleus to Joomla.  I know I could have also done the importing myself directly through MySQL, but these tools saved me some work.