Blog Overhaul

Well, I decided to overhaul my blog today. After much pondering and thought (about five minutes worth), I decided to throw WordPress at the job. Turns out that it is fairly easy to install and I got the basic install operating quite quickly. However, it wasn’t quite all fun and games.

First, I like my site design so I wanted my blog to use a similar look and feel. Since the world at large goes for all sorts of whizbang gewgaws, my site design is fairly unusual, what with its total lack of images or fancy layouts. It took me the better part of today to work out how to get the basic look right and still maintain the functionality of WordPress that I was interested in.

The second, and possibly more pressing, issue was how to get all the old comments from my original home-grown blog software into WordPress. Knowing this would not be easy, I cranked up my PHP and MySQL skillz and started poking around. Without too much trouble I managed to incant the right stuff at MySQL to copy the data from the old tables to WordPress’s tables. Thus I was able to import all my blog posts since the dawn of time and all the comments associated with them! Yah!

For those of you wondering just why I went to an off-the-shelf software package, it comes down to time. I wanted a bunch of new features which one gets with such software without having to do all the tedious research and write all the tedious code to make it happen. That is just not efficient. I have better things to do, like ripping DVDs or reading books or watching TV or what have you. It’s not that my home grown software was terrible; it was quite good for the design specifications I built it to, but it was just getting old.

So here’s my shiny new blog with all its shiny old content. If you find anything that didn’t come over correctly, feel free to let me know. Also, I am likely going to be tinkering with the site layout for some time to come so don’t be surprised if something is broken for no apparent reason. Feel free to let me know if you find something like that, too.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled sparse stream of ramblings.

2 thoughts on “Blog Overhaul”

  1. Hello William! I hope this email finds you well. I found a problem with your blog template in IE8, the footer is going right through the middle of the page. I can send you a screenshot if you like. Have a good day.

    Tyler

  2. Thanks for the note, Tyler. Would you believe you’re the first to get past the meat-space spam filter I use?
    As for the problem with the site, I cannot duplicate it, even with IE8, except if I turn on the compatibility view. Since I have made a conscious decision to not care about IE older than version 8, I will simply not be fixing it.

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