Amateur Megalomania

It seems lately I’ve been posting more about blog internal stuff than anything else.  With the migration to LivingDot, I’ve had to rebuild a lot of the template, restore plugins that I’ve decided are useful, and recover from some mistakes I’ve made in importing my WordPress database.  I’m learning a lot about SQL, thanks to the help of Chris Gidman.

One thing I’ve been wanting to do is clean up all of the old posts into proper categories, but that isn’t an easy thing to do.  Editing each post is incredibly tedious.  There is a batch editor out there for WordPress, but it only works for version 1.5 (I’m running 2.0.2).  So Chris has written me a SQL application that allows me to manipulate the data directly and merge it back into the primary database.  Pretty cool.  Now if we could figure out how to make it into a Plugin, the WordPress community could benefit.  I don’t think that’ll happen though, as a quick review of the WordPress API left us both confused.  I’m not a programmer, and Chris doesn’t know PHP.

Anyway, the categories are getting organized, and now I’m working on restoring the three years of old stuff that Movable Type (evil) consumed last year.  I found the raw HTML archives stashed away, so now I have to figure out how to convert that to proper XML and feed it back into the database.  We’re talking a couple of hundred posts.  Doable, but I have to find the correct tool to make it happen.

Why do all of this?  I guess it distracts me from actually producing new content.

In all seriousness, I would like to have this place organized better so new visitors can actually browse reasonably.  And the old stuff is important to me in an archival way.  It doesn’t offer anything really interesting to read (many of the links within posts are losts), but I still want them in here.

So, please keep stopping in.  I’m striving to produce new stuff.

Filed under: Blog Housekeeping