Tag: wordpress

A Few Fixes, Still Digging

This evening I looked at this site’s error log, and found old URLs that no longer worked. And fixed most of them.

This evening I looked at the error logs for this weblog, and found a bunch of URLs for the old weblog, which didn’t work on the new one. I added a half-dozen mod_rewrite rules, and I should be handling almost every old URL now.

There’s one last format, for the channel-specific RSS feeds, that I’ll fix tomorrow evening, but I haven’t seen any evidence that anyone other than me uses them anyway, so it might not make a difference.

The other thing that’s definitely not working is comments. I don’t turn them on for every posting, but even on the posts with comments enabled, they’re not showing up. For some reason PHP will not include the wp-comments.php file where it’s supposed to, and so none of the comments displaying or form code is being run.

I have turned on comments for this post, in case any readers have ideas for how to solve the problem, but…

What’s Old is New Again

One of the funny things about converting from one weblog system to another was that I discovered a bunch of old posts which never got, well, posted.

One of the funny things about converting from one weblog system to another was that I discovered a bunch of old posts which never got, well, posted. I had them saved as drafts, but the old system didn’t show drafts in a pending section, so if I forgot to actually publish, they would eventually roll off my screen entirely, to be forgotten.

The new system makes it really obvious when there are drafts sitting, waiting to be completed. So, I’m going in and finishing them up, and then publishing them on their original dates. This means that you won’t see them unless you scan back (way back) in time, or run across them in a search. But who knows, maybe Google will pick them up and funnel someone to them someday. Worth getting online, anyway, if only to get them out of the Drafts bin.

LTFP

I’ve been dicking around with WordPress on my test system long enough. LTFP.

“LTFP” was an acronym we used at Cymerc, the dot.bomb I worked at for 14 months before it imploded. We started using the term a couple weeks before we released the first version of our public web site. It stood for Launch This Fucking Pig, which basically meant we thought it sucked but were tired of testing, and just wanted it out the door.

LTFP is what I did very early this morning.

I’ve been dicking around with WordPress on my Mac OS X system, setting it up, configuring it to use the same URL scheme as my old weblog system, tweaking the template a bit, and — most importantly — importing all my old weblog posts from the old system. After four weeks of dithering and obsessing, it’s not done, but it’s going live anyway.

I’ve tried to not break any permalinks to pre-existing posts or the syndication feeds, and otherwise keep it compatible with the bookmarks that people may have for this site. But I’m sure there will be a few things to fix. Leave me a comment if you find something.

There’s also plenty to do on cleanup. I will probably have to edit every single post to clean up the HTML and re-link the URLs I included in old posts. And I’m not terribly happy with the design of this template, which is pretty basic, and virtually unchanged from the generic version of Kubrick, which I used to get started. It’s a great template, but there are well-understood steps I still need to take to make it my own…

Anyway, by switching to WordPress, a much more popular weblogging system, I should be back to posting regularly, as the system will get in my way a lot less.

No, Really, Back Online

OK, this time I really mean it, I’m back online with this weblog.

I have finally managed to get this weblog going again. I had a fair amount of weirdness associated with the migration from my old computer, and decided the “easiest” way to solve the issue was to change to a new weblogging system. I’ve been wanting to upgrade the capabilities of this weblog for a while, so it seemed like as good a time as any, and a better reason than I usually have.

So, after evaluating Textpattern and WordPress, I decided on WordPress. I actually like many things about Textpattern better, but the approach it uses for categories made it virtually impossible to get working with my old blog structure. WordPress, on the other hand, works exactly the way I want when it comes to categories. So here I am.

Now, let’s see if I can start writing regularly again!