Remember the classic rainbow effect in so many Atari games and demos? I dug around for some information on how to do it, and distilled it into a mini howto on the recently launched Hackszine Blog. So break out your favorite 8-bit Atari computer or emulator, and get ready for some type-in fun!
When I decided to move to WordPress, Yahoo Hosting seemed like a good choice. Unfortunately, it was not. This site is frequently unresponsive, the web control panel is often very slow and no substitute for a shell. But the worst problem of all is that the support is not so hot. I’ve had a problem with my MySQL database (”Can’t open file: ‘wp_comments.MYI’”) and an open trouble ticket for over a week, and they haven’t fixed it.
After they sent me canned responses a couple of times claiming they don’t support WordPress, I finally got them to treat it as a MySQL problem (my mistake, really–I was phrasing it as a WP problem). Five days ago, they asked me to set my MySQL password and send it to them, which is roughly when they stopped answering my emails.
Of course, they’ll eventually fix it, and I’ll stop whining. But the reality has set in: I’m not comfortable without shell access (It’s not you, Yahoo… it’s me).
As soon as I get enough time, I plan to install WordPress on AS220.org, which will also make it easier for our users to blog, and I’ll move my stuff over there. I figure if I announce my intention publicly, it will make me more likely to follow through!
Update: Well, it’s fixed, and not only was it easy enough, but it was something I should have found on my own. I made the mistake of assuming it was deep enough under the hood that I couldn’t fix it without help (as I said, not having a shell makes me uncomfortable). So now I need something else to kick me in the ass and get me to set up WordPress at AS220. Even if I don’t need to switch over there ASAP, I need to do my part make it easier for Providence artists to blog!
The next problem was the categorization of my posts. I had hundreds of posts, and they picked up the blosxom categories like /Development/XML. But I wanted tags, instead. I also wanted to cut down on the number of tags I had. At first I used the WordPress user interface, but that would have taken days. So I poked around the Yahoo site management tools, and found that it was easy to install phpMyAdmin, which lets me do ad-hoc SQL queries against the mysql database.
By going to the WordPress admin interface, clicking Manage, and then Categories, I was able to find the unique IDs that WordPress assigns to each category. So, if I wanted to change all my posts tagged “/Development/XML” so that they were tagged “programming”, I had some digging to do.
Assuming “programming” was 30, and “/Development/XML” was 16, then all I had to do was find the table where the categories are stored, and issue an SQL command like:
update whatever-the-table-is-called set whatever-the-id-is-called = 30 where whatever-the-id-is-called = 16
In phpMyAdmin, it was a matter of selecting the database named “blog” (if you’re not on Yahoo!, it might be a different name), and issuing the query against the wp_post2cat table, using the category_id column. So a command like this would do the trick (you’d need to replace 30 and 16 with the correct values for your system, and please back up your database first!!!):
update `wp_post2cat` set category_id = 30 WHERE category_id = 16
So, I did this a lot, and eventually got my categories down to something manageable. Then I used the WordPress admin UI to delete the categories I was no longer using.
If you don’t know SQL, you should read up on it before you try anything like this. One wrong move, and you could accidentally do something like change the category of every post in your archive (or worse, delete everything).
The next thing I had to tackle was to import all my blosxom entries into WordPress. I used the RSS Import feature with the entries that were in my feed, but I had a couple problems:
For the first batch I imported, I fixed the dates by hand, but that got old. So, I grabbed an RSS 2.0 flavour for blosxom, and gave it a whirl. The only problem was that it didn’t add the full text of the post by default, but that was easily fixed by adding <description>$body</description> to story.rss20.
This was OK, except for a couple of new problems:
Also, I was only seeing partial entries in my WordPress blog after importing the blosxom RSS feed. At first, I thought I was getting a truncated feed, but it turned out that my WordPress theme was using the_excerpt() instead of the_content() in archive.php, search.php, and probably some other places I haven’t discovered yet.
Way back when, I registered jepstone.net with Network Solutions. It used to be kind of tricky to deal with them: I remember having to fax a lot of stuff at one point to make some changes. It’s a bit easier right now, since they have a web interface that’s pretty decent for maintaining your domain name.
It’s basically a matter of changing your Designated DNS servers from your old hosting provider’s DNS servers to those of your new one (in my case, it was a matter of changing all the he.net entries to yahoo entries, for example ns1.he.net to yns1.yahoo.com). Then, the waiting begins.
It can take up to 48 hours for the new settings to propagate far and wide. The name servers for Cox, my home ISP, were slow at picking it up. So I tried connecting to T-Mobile’s EDGE network using my Treo as a bridge, and I found that T-Mobile’s DNS was up-to-date. So, I used that to test out my links (Yahoo! also gave me a domain name that I could use during the transition, but it was more fun to see everything working with the real domain name).
So, I was able to start playing pretty much right away. But, I got tired of the slow EDGE speed and finally called it a night. When I got up in the morning, I restarted my AirPort base station (it proxies DNS, and was caching the old, incorrect entries), and everything was working fine.
Yesterday, I got it in my head that I’ve be happy moving my blogging over to the free hosting at wordpress.com, and it didn’t work out so well, since I tripped over a bug that confused me. It was fixed pretty quickly by most measures, but I got impatient, and started thinking about what I was doing. It made the most sense to move the whole site over to a WordPress-friendly host. So here I am, after moving my blosxom blog over to Yahoo! Web Hosting. I did not have to pull a total all-nighter (and when you are changing DNS entries, it’s best to put some space between the update and when you start tinkering a lot).
In a few subsequent posts, I’ll describe some tips and tricks that I learned along the way in case it helps anyone else:
If you’re seeing this, then you’ve found my new WordPress blog. In theory, the old links should still work. I’ve switched over to Yahoo! Small Business Web Hosting, and while it’s unusual, I’m finding a way to do what I need to do, even when it’s in a where-the-hell-is-my-shell roundabout way. You’ll probably want to update your subscription at some point, but it’s probably not necessary.
AS220 has started putting up a mess of photos under their Flickr account.
Because I thought that his pipe would look better as a hook. [7/17/2005]
update: I’m flattered–bloglines is using an identical design (mirrored) for their 12/19 outage.
Overheard
in New York: “It was so lame! It was full of bloggers!…Yeah, I
know!”
