Bengfort.com

You probably have already noticed that the design of the Bengfort.com site has changed dramatically overnight. I wish I could take credit for this design and programming, but unfortunately I have simply given up with the custom site that I was building myself, and installed a prebuilt blogging software- WordPress. In the end, I just didn’t have enough time to continue to update the site on a regular basis, and continue the maintenance of the software I was writing. School had to take the priority, and even though I felt like I was writing good software, the external design was suffering as you all noticed (no more red and white!) Therefore I just moved to the more effective solution, and I think we will all benefit from it in the time being.

This is not so dramatic as it seems- the software is installed on our server and is very customizable, and I have started customizing it already adding plugins and even writing my own add-ins to the site. There are some downsides, which I will discuss in a second, but the interface is better designed, you can upload pictures, user management is improved- as well as security which is huge! You can comment and participate in the blog now, and everything is fully functioning- the software I had wrote had some gaps that I kept intending to fix, but just never got around to it.

Hopefully you guys can embrace change as we move forward. I still have your old blogs archived, and I will work on re-posting them to the site so that you can have them documented. However you will note some overall structural changes to the site that are necessary because of the software. For instance, we all blog on the same page- there is no separation by author. This might cause you some concern, but hopefully we can all collaborate together to generate awesome content! I will post some recipes, so they will appear as their own post rather than as a page. And some of the other applications, like the photo albums application isn’t available- and we’ll have to use tools like Flickr to share our photos.

Using this software may take some learning, and if you need any help getting around the interface or with blogging on the site in general, please let me know and I would be glad to help! If you are a user of the Bengfort.com site, then please register as a subscriber- this will mean that I don’t have to moderate your comments. Users from the old site are already on here- so you guys should update your profiles! And everyone should be blogging! Enjoy!