jr conlin's ink stained banana

Well, it's been about a week or so. i guess i better put up the moving report.

For the benefit of those sane enough not to read the rest of this blog, i was using a copy of b2 that i had *seriously* hacked to get things to work the way i wanted them to (things like auto-blocking, spam tagging (including a fun little tool that tagged potential spammers IPs so that it looked like their meaty comments were getting posted, but in fact they weren't), post-"posting" pingback flagging, and a bunch of other bits of joy). All of these were duct-taped and rubber banded into the code and worked well enough, but i knew full well that i really wanted to have something better.

As a bit more background for those that don't know me, i'm not a big advocate of using tech that's under the bleeding edge. i'll try it, use it myself and possibly contribute to it, but i'm not going to encourage others to do so until i view the program as being sufficiently useful. This is because i'm old enough to have been burned by previous packages that seemed slightly useful but required far more effort to actually become useful than simply using something else.

The Good
WordPress absolutely keeps to the original appeal. It's ready to go in 30 seconds or less. Edit a file, run the installer, log in and joy ensues. Plus, all data is stored in MySQL, which means that posts, comments and everything else is automatically available, and since MySQL can be more efficient about data storage than your OS can be, it also can save a fair amount of disk space.

It also has "plugins" which allow you to modify post content via optional functions using a darn spiffy technique. Granted, it'd be nice to be able to do those on a call-by-call basis, so if you wanted only one function out of a given library, but that's a minor thing and easily solved via your friend, Mr. vim (or Mr. emacs, depends on who wins the knife fight in the back alley).

Plus it's got lots of very nice management utilities, built in spam traps, and other wiz-bangery that make it rate rather high on the spiff-o-meter.

One other HUGE win for me is that they divided the styles between "admin" and "blog", meaning that there's no crossing the streams. In my old Franken-blog, things were a hair ugly since i kinda-sorta stomped on some of the styles in order to keep things tight. It goofed the admin section, but since i was the only one using it, i never complained or fixed it.

The Bad
Moving data between my old b2 install and WordPress wasn't nearly as fun-filled as i'd prefer. Granted, mostly that was my choice and decision, since i wanted to do a switch-over on my schedule. So it did mean building a bunch of PHP scripts to copy the data from the old tables into the new ones. Could i have done them as MySQL statements? Yeah, probably, but i was feeling lazy.

Because WordPress does multiple categories, there's now a separate "Categories" mapping table. Make sure you remember to map accordingly. Otherwise you get lots of head-desk poundy fun.

The other thing is that again, the "links" function is a required option which still takes more surgery than necessary to remove. Also, the Calendar is still broken. This was something i had to fix in b2 so i'm not really surprised, more annoyed, really. i'll probably make it a separate function block and might even release it into the wild.

The Stuff That The Kids Shouldn't Hear
Almost everything else was template or CSS related. Some of the functions are overtly helpful and do odd things, like not return a commentor's name or url, but display their comment text. Fortunately, WordPress defaults to fetching everything and returning them as objects, so it's damn easy to call the virtual method directly.

Most of what ate my time was delving into these sorts of issues, as well as figuring out why IE refused to display certain things. There are still a bunch of minor hacks i need to do, and frankly i'm concerned that future upgrades may stomp some of those changes, but i've been tagging and segregating things where i can, but i know i'm going to get stung by some of it.

Some of this would probably be alleviated by moving to Smarty, but again, PHP IS a templating language. Smarty is like using Perl to write a scripting language, sure, you can do it, but why?

Summary
Was it easy? No, but mostly it was self inflicted.
Was it worth it? Yep, youbetcha!
Would i recommend others to do it? If you've not monkeyed with your code, and have some time, definitely. If you have, be prepared for some goofiness, but that's what you get, and you knew it.

Hearty congrats to the WordPress team. They've definitely made a damn fine product.

According to Leo, The New York Times is on the prowl for cheap talent to abuse independent authors who blog.

Let me note that while i've STILL not given up on The Grayhound Chronicles, even if i've not actually written a new chapter in something like six months, i have been working away at Wafflehouse 5. If by "working" you accept several pages an update. And if by "update" you accept, when i've got several pages written.

Look, i've got stuff i need to do. Important stuff. And things too! Lots of things.

Still, if i were to be contacted by some book publisher who were to say offer me a deal on getting my name on a book (where i'm not going to be dumping several hundred of my own bucks into the vanity process), i'd certainly start finding more time for writing and less time for the other stuff.

The things, however… They may still need some attention.

(Ok, OK, i'll see about getting a few more pages done. Geez, you all think i"m JIM or something….)

First off, let me say that i think very highly of Tim Bray, and think that he's truly a clever man, however his recent suggestion of appending purple pound signs after paragraphs makes me wonder if possibly this is that other sort of genius arising, the one that thinks paste is a nice aperitif to serve at parties.

First off, i'd note that in his post he highlights one of the principle problems with this process, that documents on the web are not static. They change. (i'd also note that i find the entire argument about "URIs are blessed and shall never change" to be sort of insane as well. Can you really predict the future so well that you craft your URLs in the most efficient, SEO friendly manner ever, regardless of how your business model changes? Can you say "mod-rewrite"?)

Providing chapter and verse links for your page is fine if you plan on creating your own religion and want to be able to find the bit you said about "Blessed are the Cheese makers, for whey shall inherit the mirth", otherwise what's the point?

So what if someone manages to link to your content directly so that they can take your statements out of context? What, like folks can't use the built in Find function? For that matter, why bother providing that sort of thing at all when you could use the cache mechanism from Yahoo! and Google, (and is an optional plug in for a number of blog packages (like, oh, say WordPress)?

Plus, i've got problems with inserting a randomly chose character at the end of paragraphs. i mean, if that's the case, why not simply make it the last punctuation mark? Or (here's a thought) screw adding visible links on to the page and use <a name> tags embedded in the content?

Besides, i get the feeling the hyper-hyperlinking thing is going to become the new third brake-light. (When the third light was first introduced, it was great because it was new and folks learned to look for it. Now it fades into the blur of lots and lots of other brake-lights.)

Oh well, i'm sure i'm missing on whatever the brilliant utility of this sort of thing may be, and i'll once again be confirmed as a techno-luddite as pages and pages become more and more link-laden. Heck, i'm sure that someone will figure out that sentences are the new paragraphs because they're better soundbites and folks like me put too many words into them anyway.

All i know is that if i'm ever invited over to Good Mr. Bray's house, i'm skipping the canape's.

Well, i went and did it. i've converted my blog over to WordPress. Granted, i'm a bit sorry to see the old frankenblog go, since we've had a special relationship over the past year or so. Granted, a great many of the words i use to describe that relationship would never appear in Highlights, but it was a special relationship built on love.

Wait, no, love doesn't involve bodily threats and heavy drinking.

Ah, sorry, my fault. It was built on mutual antagonism.

i've also got to see about installing a custom patch that did the sorts of things that i like. Crap like lowercase my i's (to match my general lack of ego) and add "target="blank"" to my URLs. Granted, i'm reasonably sure that 90% of you actually detest both of those because it makes me look like some pseudo-angsty window monkey.

Which i am.

So deal.

So why the change? Well, to be frank about it. WordPress kicks ass. (Having been burnt by adopting tons of really god awful programs based on the hope that one day they get their act together, i'm now comfortably away from beneath the cutting edge, which means that i'm not going to try out brand new stuff, but will happily be a HUGE cheerleader once i think it's ready for prime-time.) Conversion wasn't easy, and took about a week for me to do, mostly because i wanted to keep two blogs running at the same time.

But now i've got spiffy auto-moderation, bunches of new features and am using something that can't be used to frighten misbehaving schoolchildren.

Just misbehaving site designers and graphic artists.

Who, like me, never lived in Japan nor had to deal with ungodly colored phone booths.

You know, There's nothing harder than being in a meeting room with windows facing where the Blue Angels are practicing.