The more sober among you will notice a small change in the look & feel of this here site. I’ve been toying around with WordPress on some of my other sites for a while, and it’s time I took the plunge and changed over BrentOzar.com. For the next couple of weeks, this site will be in varying levels of workitude and decrepidation.

Why the switch? There’s so many reasons I almost don’t know where to start.

I wanted one tool to manage all of the pages in my site. When I started blogging, I wrote my own blog software in .NET because I wanted to play around with Dreamweaver MX and get the functionality exactly the way I wanted it. In May of 2003, I switched to MovableType because I wasn’t developing new functionality as fast as the MT folks, and I was tired of managing my own blog software. Now, I’m tired of using one tool to manage my blog, and another tool to manage the rest of the pages in my site. WordPress lets me manage all of my content in a single web-based tool that works on both my Mac and my PCs.

Easier content management is important to me because I wanted to start introducing more business-based content in here. I’m mentoring a couple of guys at work who are interested in becoming database administrators, and I’ll be putting my training materials in here. These gems of knowledge aren’t really blog entries, and they’ll change over time as I flesh them out, but I didn’t want to use yet another content management tool. WordPress does a great job of handling both date-related things like blogs, and content-related things like articles.
Another reason: WordPress makes it easier to support microformats, which are tiny snippets of HTML that encapsulate little standards. Microformats will change the web. I’m positive of it. Microformats are going to make it easier to share and distribute content, especially like the DBA training articles I’ll be working on. I don’t intend to make any money off these articles, and I’d like to see them syndicated so other DBAs-in-the-making can have an easier time getting up to speed. I’m excited to see how microformats can help make that happen.

And yet another reason – ever since I realized that Matt was the guy behind WordPress, I’ve felt horribly guilty about not using his software on my blog. I didn’t put two and two together until I noticed a Valleywag article, and suddenly I went, “Ahhh, I’ve seen that guy before!” Duh.

And last and probably least (no offense), Lloyd reminded me of my guilt by joining Automattic, the folks who make WordPress.