Slow Posting Lately and Other Programming Notes

I know it has been a little slow posting here lately. The slowdown occurred last week when I decided to move this blog out of Movable Type and into WordPress. While setting up WordPress is always a breeze and Movable Type allows you to export all blog content into a flat text file for easy importing into WordPress, what followed was something I did not expect.

Because of the manner I used to post to Movable Type – writing posts in html format using a WYSIWYG editor, and then cutting and pasting into the Movable Type blogging platform prior to publishing, once entries were brought into WordPress, every post contained numerous scenarios of sentences truncating to the line below. In other words, sentences would not run the complete length of the page but be cut off and appear on the line below. This makes for some very sloppy looking posts. That is not the only problem I encountered.

Because the version of Movable Type I was using had an “intro” field and a “main body” field, I would always include an opening paragraph which most often was the same or very similar to the opening paragraph in the post itself. What WordPress did was to add the “more” tag after the intro text which creates the scenario of having two duplicate or near duplicate opening paragraphs, separated by the “more” tag.

Finally, the way Movable Type forms the actual files names of posts is different than WordPress. I did use the “month/date/post title” method but Movable Type ends with a .html whereas WordPress does not. I therefore had to customize the Permalink feature in WordPress to include the .html at the end of every post. This does not negate the fact that I have to hand edit every post file name to match the originals in the Movable Type platform so I do not lose the link popularity that many posts have inherited over time.

So, I have to hand edit each post, fixing truncate errors, renaming file names and removing intro text and “more” tag for 569 posts. If you think this is slow, boring work, you are correct in your assumption. To date, I have edited 165 posts and have 404 remaining. It depresses me to even write that.

Additionally, because I have the WordPress blog on a different IP address, I have to manually duplicate comments that are made on the current active blog still sitting under the Movable Type platform. I expect the hand editing to take at least another 15-20 days after which I still have to select and tweak a new design. So, posting will continue to be slow.

Moving the blog over into WordPress is going to allows for some improvements. For example, current all comments are nofollowed only because I cannot figure out how to make them followed. Actually it is the fault of the current CAPTCHA style comment spam filter I have installed. The plug-in does not provide a way to “follow” links in comments but “unfollows” them automatically. Not so in the WordPress platform. All links in comments will be followed as I believe in rewarding good comments with link juice.

The new design will allow use to start selling advertising as well. So if you are not a direct competitor and would like to advertise on this blog, that opportunity should be available in October.

Finally, because we use WordPress on all the other various blogs we run, it will be so much easier to keep everything up to date as far as backing up blogs, updating plug-ins, etc.

Thanks for your patience during this transition. In the meantime if I get inspired to write something or something extraordinary occurs, I’ll simply write a post as I am doing right now, and publish it in two places.