How Did I Get Here?

Quote of the Day: “I’ve learned that no matter how much I care, some people are just assholes.”

Sometimes I wonder where the time went. When I come out of my reverie and realize I’ve sat at the computer for 5 or 6 hours, oblivious that so much time has passed. The kids have gone to bed, Carrie is watching TV downstairs, and I look up to see that I have less than 5 hours until I have to get up and start another day.

Then I cry.

(not really, I actually get kinda pissed but that’s my warped personality/problem)

You would think that I would be satisfied with my accomplishments. That after so much diligent work, I could go to bed feeling good about the progress I made in whatever endeavor sparked my marathon computer sessions.

But alas…

What was tonight’s preoccupation? Well, back in July, I discovered the world of WordPress and decided my blog needed to use the latest blogging technology. For those of you not in the know, WordPress is blogging software that you download for free and once you get it set up, it uses a web interface to manage your blog.

So I revamped the blog to what you see today but I had to deal with the situation of sucking in all the old blog entries in order to consolidate all my blogs into one neat package, i.e. the WordPress.

The problem was that my old blog was just raw HTML. I basically made simple, static webpages for each month and updated it by hand. The difference here is that rather than making simple webpages, software like WordPress creates a database of entries and “creates” the blog page every time someone goes to the blog.

Anyway, there was no easy way to import all the old blog entries because they were just flowing text on a webpage and not individual entries. WordPress allows you to import from different blogging programs but to import text from a webpage like I needed, you had to go through and set up each page to a very specific format before running a script on it that broke each entry into individual posts and imported them.

It ends up this process was time-consuming and difficult to get just right, especially considering I’m damn-near retarded.

I spent more than a little time doing this but didn’t get very far. After I imported each month, I had to go through and relink the links, do some specialized formatting, and get any pictures re-inserted. It ended up I was practically recreating every post and I soon lost interest. I thought I could just do it here and there, eventually getting it done. But like most things in this vein, the “here and there” became “almost never.”

The project just kind of fizzled but it bothered me. In the back of my mind, I always felt there was something left undone and like all of my half-finished projects, it gnawed away at my daily joy.

Tonight I was updating my links and it occurred to me that I was an idiot. Not a novel concept but specifically, I was an idiot for not realizing that all of the entries prior to June of 2005 were already perfectly formatted and ready for viewing. My search program indexed them so if something was in there that I was looking for, it would be found.

Instead of trying to import all the old entries, why don’t I just link to them as entire months and call it good? It would also delineate in time when I started using the new software.

To accomplish this, it would appear that it would be an easy procedure. Looks can be deceiving.

First, I had to get rid of all the imported entries from those old months. I would be creating links to the old pages so didn’t want repeated entries in the WordPress entries.

Logging onto the web interface, I decided that I could just make those entries “private” so it wouldn’t kill them, only prevent them from showing up in the Archive section. But there was no “mass editing” function so I had to edit EVERY entry and mark it as “private.” After waiting for the change to take on a few entries, I figured there had to be a better way. My search for a mass editing solution in the interface failed, as indicated by my loud cussing.

Then I remembered that my webpage provider, POWWEB, had an interface to any databases you used on your site. I logged onto the online administrator interface and had to resurrect my knowledge of SQL commands that lay hidden in the depths of my memory.

After much trial and error (and crying and cussing), I finally figured out how to create an SQL command that went through and replaced “publish” status to “private” on only a certain number of entries. I realized that all the posts were numbered so in the command, I filtered only those posts that had less than a certain number. How did I know what the “magic number” was? By looking up what the very last “imported” entry number was. All post #’s less than that were the old imported ones.

To figure out how to do this, it took a couple of hours.

To execute the command?

0.93 secs.

Now that the old entries were gone, I had to figure out how to create links on the dynamic page that you see when you see this blog. For this, I had to dive into the templates.

Now I’ll admit, I don’t know much about php (pCp, maybe but…where was I?…). It’s kind of like a basic code that looks kind of logical but if you don’t know how to read it, it’s a bunch of gobbildy-gook. Through more trail/error/crying/cussing, I discovered that I could put in a hard-coded link into the “side-panel template” and it would show up looking just like the dynamically generated Archive links you see over on the side.

So that’s what I did. It took awhile and it kind of breaks the rules of dynamically created webpages (because it’s hard-coded and thus must be maintained manually), but like one of my favorite quotes states, “If it’s stupid but it works, then it ain’t stupid.”

So there you have it. Now I can rest my mind that my webpage is up to date and it has working links to all the past drivel I have inflicted on you people.

And just for kicks, I threw in a pic of Buster thanking everyone for stopping by. Make sure you send him email thanking him for thanking you. He can be so high-maintenance when it comes to things like this.

Free Advice for Today: “Spend time with lucky people.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 21st, 2006 at 11:27 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.