Technically Speaking

If you haven’t noticed by now, I decided to temporarily and possibly permanently remove all the other skins from this site. It is no longer a skinable site. I have been wanting to make a few changes to the way the site is laid out and trying to do such changes and make them work properly with all the skins involves more time than I have for the task. This choice will make the site much easier for me to maintain. So if you were enjoying one of the other skins, sorry for the drastic change.

I have finally done it, and it is good. I have moved this site to WordPress and spent many hours lastnight doing it. The basic conversion was fast and seamless. I really had no problems getting the MT content into the WP system. The troubles began when I started to configure the site to what it is now. (and it will continue to change throughout this day.) There is a bit of a learning curve trying to figure out how to customize a WP site. I must say that once I figure out the solution the result are much beter than they are with MT.

I owe some thanks to Mog and to Charles for they both have helped me get through a few hurdles. THANKS!!!!

Please bear with me as I continue to work on this site. You may see some strange formatting and such…I’m working on the style sheets and other ornaments that the site previously had.

Over the weekend I have converted one of the auxiliary blogs, “Off The Cuff”, on this site to a WordPress blog. I have been idly playing with it on my home box, but now I have pretty much decided that I would like to convert this site over to WP and this conversion was a test to see just what would be involved in the switch. A couple things I am concerned about now are keeping my individual pages to the same naming structure so I won’t have to worry about other schemes for keeping inbound links intact and secondly, skinning a WordPress site.

Finding time to experiment with ideas is becoming harder each day but I have been able to find a resource that will allow WordPress individual archives to be just like MT’s. I have also seen a skinned WordPress sites, Mind of Mog being an excellent example of one. I have briefly played with skinning a WP site on my home box and unless I’m short sighted, it seems to be relatively the same technique as it is for a MT site. Mind of Mog is also keeping a tally of those that are making the wise move.

Oz Guru is one of the people on the Switchers list and he has also added some of the WP hacks to his install as well. You can see some of the hacks he has implemented here and some custom work here.

Hopefully, in a couple of weeks I will be able to find the time to make the switch myself. I will definitely be keeping an eye out for more tips, tricks and custom work for WP.

Ok all, I have been steadily working on this site for the last couple of weeks. So far, the major accomplishments are that this site has moved to a new hosting company. It wasn’t a particularly good move, but a move nonetheless. It has taken this much time to finally get the bugs/issues almost all worked out. In addition to the relocation, I have added two new blogs to this site. Off the Cuff, a site where I can speak freely, not technically, and Gadget of the Week, where I will highlight a gadget that I find particularly interesting for the week. I’m up to date with the gadgets site but the Off the Cuff site is a little behind. I predict a somewhat slow ramp up on it. Sorry all but I have many oars in the water right now.

As for this site, I have a few more tweaks to make and one rebuild error to attend to. As far as I know, this error is not a detectable one to the public. So I don’t see it as being crucial. I will be making a few changes to the category templates for the error is happening in this area of the blog. Stay tuned for more. I hope you enjoy the new content.

I know that there are problems with this site right now. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to address them til the evening hours. So if you have issues operating through this site, please bear with me.

Well, I’m tinkering with this site again. I suspect that I will never have the site exactly how I want it. Let’s go over what I have done and what needs to be done….

I have re-entered the entries that were lost in my site conversion to MySQL.

I have taken a mess of JavaScript off of the pages and put them into external files.

I have put in a request for new webspace with HostRocket. I have an account with them hosting my family website. I think I will be doing myself good by moving to their servers. I will get 50GB of bandwidth each month with rollover bandwidth. Also, I’ll be working with a Gig of space. I’ll keep you posted as to how this transition goes.

I have noticed that my Category pages are not formatted properly. I don’t know what the cause is as of yet. I suspect something went awry with the pagination template that I am using. Unfortunately, I don’t have time tonight to troubleshoot the case. Hopefully by next weekend I will be able to correct the problem. I should have the new webspace up and running by that time.

I have a new idea for my “other page” that was formerly my “Memory Links”. I will unveil it when the new space is up and running.

More updates to come.

Okay, I finally got a plugin working that I have been messing with for months now, off and on. AdSenseStats is working and I must say that it will be a great tool for me to check my info. I still stand behind my assertion that MT Plugin Manager doesn’t work the way you would expect it to work. I have found that the plugin, OtherBlog didn’t install properly through the manager as well as the others I listed in the previous entry. The manager didn’t catch that OtherBlog didn’t install when it did on the others. After installing it manually, I found that it worked properly. So I decided to install AdSenseStats manually and it worked the first time through. I have racked my brain and John’s brain trying to get his plugin to work. Just another benefit of working with a clean slate.

Well, so far things are looking pretty good. I have just finished moving all of my templates and plugins over to the new install. Things are so much easier the second time around. I have spent many hours putting the fine touches on this site and today, I have had to recreate about half of them within the span of a few hours. I truly thought that I wouldn’t have this site back to a workable state until later this week. I must be getting good in my old age.

Some positive things have come out of this experience. I guess the main lesson here is to backup your site. This should be a daily habit but I am a bit forgetful at times and couple that with laziness…you get the picture. I’ll try to make it a point to make an export of this site at least once a week. If I should need another fresh start I hope that I will be able to get away with only a few entries that will need to be manually entered. Another lesson learned is that I should stop procrastinating when it comes to fixing known issues with this site. The Berkeley database has been corrupt for about 4 months now. We tried to get away from the database at that time but the conversion process from Berkeley to MySQL didn’t go well. At that time I could have entered the hand few of entires that didn’t make it through automatically. Hindsight is 20/20. At the time I thought that we might be able to find a solution to the conversion and /or the existing problem would go away.
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Ok all, I have been trying to have this blogsite work with a MySQL database and it hasn’t been converting over nicely. So I am at the point where I have to create a new database and continue on blogging, leaving behind all that I have blogged about before. What does this mean? Well, all of my entries are on this server in my individual pages. Those will stay as is. If you have links to those entries, they will still work. Unfortunately, since the actual posts are not in the new database, you will not be able to search this site for any old articles. This seems to be the only option I have left, cutting off a leg to save the body. I will be working on this site for the next few days to get everything configured pretty much back to the way it was, so bear with me. Hopefully I can be back to normal by Friday. Wish me luck!

Thank you to Simon, at Bloggedup.com, for trying his best to get this all working with MySQL. There is something corrupt in my old MT setup that prevents a smooth conversion. Simon has work all weekend to get this back to normal but it just isn’t possible. So onward we go.