Surprising, perhaps, but nothing is as easy as it seems at first. What started as a simple task last week to add commenting to my blog entries, turned into a major recasting of the website and several days of lost time. For the past four years the site has been run on a combination of Movable Type and a mySQL database for stock searches. After talking it over with other photographers I decided to look at WordPress which held the promise of easier updates and maintenance, more plugins and a simpler interface.

Now after days of puzzling though permalinks and Apache rewrites (mysteries of the deep to most people), I have a hybrid site, with some pages served by MT and others by WP. The plan is to migrate category by category and add new material along the way. Once the structure is finalized it would be really nice to have a designer rework the look and feel.

In terms of lessons learned, this seems once more example of the increasing burden on photographers to be skilled at web use, internet marketing, photoshop post-processing, digital calibration, 101 other arcane technical know-hows, and yes at the end of it all, photography. All the web work should, in the end, result in the presentation of more newer images in a more timely manner. And now with comments enabled. That’s the plan.