For a few months we’ve been working on switching blogging platform from WordPress to Ghost. This week we’ve finally made the leap. I’ve tried, where possible, to make the new site look like the old site. Nevertheless, you might notice some changes, good and bad. We’ll start with the good.

What’s working

We’re integrating the mailing system into the site. It means you can now choose to have just The Week in Botany or, if you wish, get the latest posts emailed as they get published. This won’t happen with puzzles (more below), but will with pretty much everything else.

We’ve added better share buttons. These are hard-coded so they don’t have a little pixel from a social media site tracking you. If you’re reading on mobile, the share button should trigger your phone’s native sharing menu, so I’m not left trying to guess which social media site you prefer.

On desktop, you should see share, email and print buttons. Try printing this page - or at least seeing a print preview. You should see that the layout is way way tidier than the old site. If you want to print copies of a web page off, it should be a lot cleaner.

I mentioned puzzles. This came about from me feeling ill, and taking things easy by browsing iNaturalist. There are some stunning photographs, and I wondered if we could help get more of an audience for them. The result was Plant Hunt. We also have some other ideas so weekend games may go into rotation. These are blocks of JavaScript, and will not work in your email inbox, so we won’t be emailing them.

But it’s not all about adding things. What we’ve taken away is tracking. Being based on WordPress, we had to use their statistics system, which is very good, but didn’t give us any option how we tracked visitors. That means we might have been more intrusive than we needed. Here the statistics are passive. That means we don’t know your age, sex, where you like to visit on the web or what you had for breakfast. I’ve seen cookie banners that say “We and our 17000 partners take your privacy very seriously...” Well, while a breakdown by age and sex would be useful, we do take your privacy seriously, so we’re not prying and therefore don’t need a cookie banner.

What isn’t working yet

Moving servers means moving our address on the web. We’ve submitted updated DNS records, but it takes time to propagate around the web. If you find access to the site patchy, that’s likely a result of it taking time for things to resolve.

Another example of things needing time is the translation system. The translation system is geared to WordPress. I’ve tried modifying it for Ghost, but there’s still some bugs in it at the time of writing. If a translated page looks odd, try shift+reload and that should fix it. I think it’s a cache problem, so I’m trying to find ways to flush that properly.

Page addresses have changed. What was botany.one/year/month/item is now www.botany.one/item. There are forwarding rules set in place so bookmarks and links should work, but there are over 5000 items to check. This will take a while.

The search engine can be improved. This is a priority to fix, not least because I need it. I’m aiming to have this working next week.

I’ve also found that not all author credits are formatted correctly. This is down to the system used to store them on WordPress not quite transferring to Ghost. These will be tidied up over the next month or so. There are a LOT of authors.

If you find something else else that isn’t working as you think it should, then please do email webmaster@botany.one and I’ll look into it.

What’s staying the same

If you follow some trends in websites, you might have some worries. Ghost is very good for people who want to sell subscriptions to premium emails. The features of the site make running a commercial website a lot easier. However, it also makes life easier if you’re not running a commercial website too. The site will continue to be funded by the Annals of Botany Company, which has been a non-profit since 1887. That means we’ll continue to run with no subscription fees and no adverts.

I’ve mixed feelings about the move. I like WordPress and I think their customer support team are well-named as “Happiness Engineers”. I also think Buttondown is an excellent email system. It’s just that we really need something integrates better with the website. Fortunately, Ghost’s import service is outstanding. I've felt no regret while making the move. So while it’s a pity to leave, we’re looking forward to a future where everything is pulling in the same direction, giving us more time to concentrate on botany.