Blogs.CodeGear.com to convert to WordPress MU

A WordPress Explosion

That’s right folks there are gonna be about 90 new WordPress blogs out there. Blogs.CodeGear.com, Borland’s home for Employee Blogs, and Blogs.TeamB.com, home for a sqad of volunteers who support the CodeGear community,  are leaving the open source .Text  solution behind forever.  And they are moving to WordPress MU, baby! 

What the heck are .Text and WordPress MU (Myooo? Moo?) anyway????

.Text is a .NET 1.1 blogging software package said to be at the top of the heap back before 2004 ended.  2004 was the year of it’s last update.  Meanwhile WordPress MU is a Multi User wrapper around the current source code for the very popular WordPress blogging softare.

OK… Spill the beans…

“How do I know all this juicy gossip?”, you might well ask.  Well, it just so happens that those 90 or so blogs are going to be converted by none other than YOURS TRUELY! 

That’s right, as of today, a goal I had dreamed about back in 1987, as I helped my highschool computer teacher figure out how to use Turbo Pascal (and supplied the school’s pirated copy of Fortran 77 too SHHH!!!) has finally been met: I am now a Borland CodeGear (contract) Programmer.  How cool is that???

I pitched this project to Allen Bauer back in February.  Their current implementation of .Text seemed somewhat dated and limited in its ablities, from a readers perspective.  I knew that even just working evening hours and weekends, I could quickly turn their site around and give them something MUCH more robust.  I’d not heard anything back from Allen.  So, I’m not certain if my original suggestion had anything at all to do with the fact that John Kaster went looking for a WordPress developer or not.  Either way, I saw a post by John asking for someone experienced in WordPress, and I leapt at the opportunity.  Well, as of tonight, it’s official.  The “Please welcome Brian Layman” email has gone out to the powers that be.  And after a few conversations,  I’m now set up with all sorts of CodeGear goodness that I can tell you absolutely nothing about! MWAHAHAHAHAAHA!

Seriously though, this is gonna be a great project to work on and I’m going to be enjoying every moment of it. I’ve done my share of blogs and sites, (I actually should be anouncing another new site tomorrow btw), but an 88 site conversion is certainly exciting enough to raise an eyebrow or two on any WordPress developer’s face.   I just want to thank John Kaster for allowing me the opportunity to participate in this project.

So, keep your eyes out for the switch over sometime in the not too very distant future.   I’ve just begun work tonight, learning the ins and outs of their current infrastructure.  If all goes well… well, actually, I’ll leave the end of that sentence up to the fine folks at CodeGear.