Slate re-wiped
Fri, 12/04/2009 - 09:04

I have just deleted all my historical entries. I don't really want to find a way to import them; if they were going to be online, I'd want to read them first and do some cleanup work, discarding stuff I didn't feel should still be online and making sure the formatting was consistent.

That makes the project a fairly large one, and instead of doing it, I've been using the fact that I haven't done it as an excuse not to write new entries. That's bad behavior, and I'm putting a stop to it.

Clean Slate, Scribbled Upon
Thu, 09/03/2009 - 04:50

After about two years of wanting to, and nearly eleven years to the day since I wrote my first online journal entry, I have finally switched over from Geeklog to WordPress. I've managed to pretty much duplicate my layout without any tables or image-based borders. It seems to work properly in both Safari and Firefox. I'm told it doesn't degrade well in IE6, but I don't really care; if you're still using IE6, then for the love of all that is good, please stop.

Old comments and user accounts are gone; I didn't feel like trying to separate out the hundred or so legitimate ones from the thousand or so spammer accounts set up on the Geeklog system. WordPress should be a bit more secure in that regard.

It is also entirely possible that some layout problems will materialize if a post generates a lot of comments. I haven't tested that. And of course other issues may come up as well. If I find them or you report them, I'll try to fix them as quickly as possible.

I'm going to try hard to migrate all my old entries into the new system. This will take a long time, and will be a great deal of work; about half the entries are in Geeklog, for which there seems to be no reliable converter available, and half are in nonfunctional PHP files that depend upon a Movable Type installation that I no longer have, so they need to be scavenged out of the midst of a bunch of my earliest, very ugliest PHP code. Nonetheless, I'm going to do my best to get it all in there.

I'll be starting from the beginning, so you can enjoy the ramblings of Bill circa 1998 if you're so inclined. Enjoy!