SDavidPrince

From static files, to XML Blogger templates this site has again moved to WordPress.
As usual no one is supposed to notice as the site contents and design still look the same (just some little changes hooray to those who noticed).

For the past years I hosted on the Google Blogger platform. It’s absolutely free and I’ve been tinkering a lot on it. Tinkering on my blogger site became one of the things I really enjoyed doing. 🧡🧡
I must really say I enjoyed the Blogger experience as I was able to work my way around with it and implemented a lot of things on the site.

I named the design for my site the AllOne theme. It started as a static HTML, CSS, JavaScript (jQuery) template to a XML Blogger compatible template. And now it has been refined to be a wordpress theme coded in PHP.

Update: Rebuilt a block FSE version of the theme. Turns out it’s simpler to configure and setup a block theme and there’s still a lot I’ve not been able to replicate. So yes this post feels old already. Still Learning and a Work in Progress

I always tinker on this site and I’ll always see it as a work in progress and I keep a log of changes I make to the site.

The reason for naming my theme “AllOne” is obvious. It’s built to handle different kind of contents I post: articles, photos, comics, social notes, and different post kinds including reply, reposts, RSVP, likes. My theme is built in microformats2, schema microdata structure and also supports RelMeAuth, syndication, webmentions, pings, membership sign-up/login and also have a storefront.

The theme will forever be responsive, have breadcrumbs, be teal and maintain a good accessibility standard. No matter what infrastructure I rebuild the theme on.

Even though Blogger is not made for it, when I was hosted on the platform, I was able to implement and integrate all of the above features to the theme. Thanks to the Blogger official community, and various good people who share guides and resources for free.

And I appreciate other tools which made the features complete as I relied on them. I used webmention.io to accept webmentions and brid.gy for syndication, Firebase to handle a member area, and Flutterwave was my payment gateway. Ecwid handled my blogger site storefront and Disqus handled comments.

With all these set up, I didn’t just have an independent site on Blogger, I was also federating and have a functional login and sign up system for the site with members-only sections and posts.

Every month I was able to download a backup of my site theme and contents. (For some reason Google made this harder or easier with Google takeout –

It was easier because in a single click you get to choose your website content type to be downloaded (comments, posts, images) or rather just download it all. A zip file would be sent via mail, in it contents grouped in folders.

And I’ll still say it became harder because formerly, all I have to do is just click on export from the blogger setting.

Maybe there should be an option to choose whether to use takeout to download full site backup or not – the direct download was so much convenient. (Cheers to old blogger users hehehe).

Well, thanks to that superb feature of blogger, the platform is considered a good IndieWeb silo, and migrating to WordPress was a breeze (would be the same for any other platform that allows importing contents from a xml file or rss / atom feed)

I had to move to WordPress for some reason and I’m already finding WordPress too…(overwhelming?) I hope I can stay focused.

WordPress is giving me this total liberation and free feeling, and just day one of using the platform I already have 70 plus plugins. Eeeww.

There are some features Blogger has out of the box which on WordPress I had to add it to the theme or download a plugin for.

Out of the box on blogger, it’s very easy to add Location to posts but on WordPress I had to download the simple location plugin. Just to disable Gutenberg, I had to download a plugin (I want to disable it from the theme but sometimes it’s convenient to use blocks to edit pages), I enjoy writing in a simple classic (WYSIWYG, TinyMCE, markdown) editor. And I really needed a plugin for my cookie bar which is default on Blogger.

Nonetheless, this WordPress site still gives me the web liberty and tinkering vibes. WordPress can do it all. First I had to redesign the AllOne theme to be WordPress compatible. WordPress uses PHP and I was able to find a template which aided me in developing my AllOne WordPress theme, and in the process I’m learning to code in PHP. The design is still the same as my Blogger theme, I made little tweaks and had to drop the menu search and bookmark feature.

The AllOne theme is decently very light (the first version was 968kb) in size and to implement most features I just had to install plugins like the bbpress, buddypress and pmpro for membership, the indieweb plugin, post kinds, webmentions, classic editor, syndicated links, Microformats2 (in case of incasity) for Indieweb features.

All these implementation was not this bloated on blogger, but the merit with WirdPress is that I won’t have to debug all the time; all it takes is just a simple click of an update button.

I still had to code some features myself like the Comic post kinds extension, the safelink feature, scroll progress bar, comment editor, social share buttons, calendar widget… I even made a people logger plugin to log people I’ve mentioned and site I stumbled upon.

My coding progress was faster with Claude Ai chat bot as my very very very annoying assistant. In just a few months Claude have so much improved what it struggled with then it didn’t now and I felt like I could have waited but anyway it was fun and daunting learning and coding in PHP. If I were to start building my theme now I wouldn’t have done much work as I did but its all good the way I did it, I know I really did hell of a work coding, recoding, compiling, prompting, reprompt, reprompt, reprompt, learn, learn, fix, fix, fix, fix. It seemed like Claude would just bring some random stackoverflow code so using it was much like the platform but questuons are private and response is a breeze.

Making this WordPress theme, I was guided by my previous AllOne theme for design, the Sempress theme coded in Microformats2, Buddyx theme by wbcombo and the Buddy theme by ghostpool.

PHP was new to me and I learnt it during the process of making this site theme. The whole AllOne WordPress theme took about six months to complete. My first 4 (four) months was actually learning and understanding PHP and WordPress theme structure.

Looking back at when I was designing the Blogger version, even when it was just a single xml template theme, it took me almost a year to complete. Then, I had to move forth and back from stack overflow, to codepen and to different website guides to aid my coding process. Now, I should be able to hard code or vibe code a blogger template in less than 3 weeks.

The site you see now is hosted on WordPress and no longer blogger.

The best part of this switch is the fact that I’m no longer under the terms of Google as when I was still hosted on Blogger and yes I still stand on similar terms.

Also, I no longer have to use //www.mydomain.com – it’s simply //mydomain.com. I’ve always wanted to host on a naked domain which is impossible on blogger.

And yes! I finally got to drop Google analytics, and the disqus comment system. I still really appreciate and acknowledge their usefulness. Everyone can still see that their legacy remains on this site. I have still a cookie banner; I give out cookies majorly for comments, and the comment section design retained some disqus features which includes the like/dislike button and the comment editor.

On this WordPress site, I’m able to have all I need in one place without some custom work arounds and external services. Now I can fully stick to the POSSE principle I wanted.

I have a section for everything I’ll discontinue some sub-domains like store.sdavidprince.space, now located at sdavidprince.com/store and which I now manage with the EDD plugin with some template tweaks.
wiki.sdavidprince.space which is hosted on GitHub pages will now be managed here on sdavidprince.com/wiki ; same for glossary.sdavidprince.space which is now accessible at sdavidprince.com/glossary.
And my docs are now at sdavidprince.com/docs (By the way, it is not hosted on wordpress)
I still use DocuWiki for my documents and notes which used to be on docs.sdavidprince.space.

Oh did I forget to mention my site’s new address is sdavidprince.com. It is no longer sdavidprince.space; I totally forgot about renewing it and I’ve not been able to get it back. I got this new domain locally from Truehost in Naira so I am able to connect an auto-renew directly to my Naira wallet.
That’s my Truehost referral link. I recommend the platform for purchasing cheap affordable domain in Naira. I said “for domain”. The only issue I have with them is their WhoIs protection works best on .ng and .ng.com extensions. I’m exposed on my .com extension but I don’t mind maybe for now.
Not a full experiment because I haven’t bought any other extension from them.

Now it’s all set…

My presence on the web is absolutely managed from this site. Every other profile I manage will just be a syndicate. This includes my social media profiles and my fediverse profiles mastodon, bluesky, bookwrym, pixelfed.
All thanks to the ActivityPub, WebSub, Friends, Webfinger and NodeInfo(2) plugins, this site is also my fediverse instance which means this site is part of the fediverse and anyone can federate with me on this site. I’m even tempted to plug Atmosphere for ATProto; not needed but to tinker.

Anyone can view this site colophon and credits page to see the tech and resources used to keep this site running.

Thanks and kudos to all the WordPress.org developers and contributors, more thanks to the developers and contributors to the various plugins I use and finally much more thanks to my friends and all supporters.

Happy what?
Happy enjoying this site