Almost There! A Few More Tweaks…
April 29, 2006
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Technical Feedback : 13 comments
I’m getting there. This is an extraordinary amount of work, though. My family doesn’t even know me anymore.
Part of the issue is that the old blog was added to piecemeal over a few years. This one’s going up in two weeks.
Here’s a few things I’ve had to do since the last post:
1. Put in redirects in .htaccess file
2. Edit the old blog template to put links to the new blog on every page
3. Populate categories and edit posts to match
4. Deal with the post-name differences between Blogger and Wordpress
5. Fiddle with Wordpress plugins and possible other templates—I really wanted a three column layout, but haven’t found one that won’t require a ton of CSS recoding and works with the new Widget model
6. Move image files between domains
7. Use the Search and Replace plug-in to fix all the image links
8. Deal with CHMOD attribute issues
9. Learn German so I can understand the Wordpress plugin developers who are writing the coolest plugins (and install their work correctly—yikes!)
The sad truth I’ve learned about the move is that there are too many issues still with Blogger to Wordpress imports, so a word to those who are considering the move:
1. You’ll lose all style formatting on text. Goodbye, boldface and italics…
2. The truncating of post_name data in Blogger really fouls up Google and breaks internal links like crazy. No easy fix.
3. Kiss image alignment goodbye, too. You want word-wrap around images? Gotta redo it by hand.
4. Adding categories to old posts is a real pain.
5. Half of all Wordpress plugins and themes have some quirk that render them less than useful or downright deadly. The other half don’t work with v2.0. There’s also an assumption by most developers that you’ll know exactly how to set the CHMOD for each plugin file correctly. Sure, you can fix most problems by setting everything to 666, but sometimes you’ll get that odd one that needs more permissions.
7. CSS’s linear arrangement on a printed page really stinks for trying to troubleshoot issues.
8. Someone pressure Apple to create blogging and Web layout software! They’re the only company that understands that not everyone can know everything about every detail of CSS3, XHTML, JS, and Ajax, even the total gearheads. If Apple had made all the software I’ve been using, I would have been done last week.
9. With all the fixes you need to make on an import, consider the truth that you’re ultimately going to have to fix everything by hand anyway. Despite the fact you can run a few MySQL routines to do global replacements, not every replacement can be tackled globally. When the post_name, image placement, and category issues are confronted, the hard truth is you’ll be hand-correcting almost every post. Ugh.
10. FTP’ing one big file is quick. FTP’ing a million small files is painstakingly slow, even over a high-speed connection. Client talks to server and says, “I’m sending a file. I want to put it here. If there ain’t no there there, create it. Now I want to load that file. Here’s how I want it uploaded. Make sure you’re ready to handle it now. Now handle it. And when you’re done, tell me everything there is to know about how you handled it. Now here’s another file….” Yuck! Wordpress developers love to make themes and plugins composed of hundreds of tiny PHP files. All I can figure is that they all have gigabit ethernet connections through fibre. Nothing else can explain a 3MB plugin that has 5,000 files.
And one last question for you CSS priests: I set the opacity on the wrapper on this site to 85% in order to let a little background through. I like the look, especially with a fixed background. Unfortunately, I can’t find a way in the CSS model to keep the opacity on all my images at 100%. Any ideas? The CSS source code is easy to view.
Thanks. Expect to see new, non-tech posts here for Monday!
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MySQL, MyPHPAdmin, CSS Helps Needed
April 28, 2006
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Technical Feedback : 15 comments
I promise I’m in my last week of messing around with the blog before I start posting real content.
If any of you have experience with any of the items in the title, I could use your help:
- 1. MySQL & MyPHPAdmin - Because Blogger truncates and removes articles from post name URLs, my migration has not been without a few issues. I have 400 hundred posts that came over in my import and I hardcoded the permalink structure to mimic Blogger. This keeps old links from breaking. However, the truncation and article issue whacks link anyway; 300 links must be fixed by hand.Ugh.
I know nothing about MySQL, but enough to have it return all the post names in the post_name field through MyPHPAdmin. But when I try to edit that field, the edit function in MyPHPAdmin pulls up all the rest of the fields associated with a post when I click on the edit button. Sure, I can edit the post_name, but saving saves all the information from every field and that is taking me a ton of time per post.
What I’d like to is have it return nothing but the post names, then when I click on edit, it opens only the post names, not the rest of the post fields. Then I can save changes only to the post_name and not have to save the post_name along with all the other post data.
The way I’m doing this now is taking almost a minute to two minutes to save the edited post. I have a relatively fast connection to the Internet, but it’s not a T1, so I’d like to edit JUST the post_name and save it alone and not have to resave the fields I’m not modifying.
Any ideas of this is done? I’ve got to believe it’s possible. Doing hand work is bad enough, but waiting so long to save each correction is a nightmare.
Does this question make sense?
2. The Joys (not) of CSS - I have no ability to read other people’s CSS, especially when it sprawls across pages and pages. I’m trying to make general color and font-size changes to the original Wordpress theme, but I can’t line up the CSS I’m seeing in text on a page with what I’m seeing displayed when the site loads up. Does anyone know of a free CSS editor that allows me to look at specific page elements and make changes to them (even when they are objects that posses multiple states, such as a rollover button)?
Technorati Tags: MySQL, MyPHPAdmin, CSS
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The New Home of Cerulean Sanctum!
April 25, 2006
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Technical Feedback : 5 comments
Folks, I may only do one or two more posts at the old URL for Cerulean Sanctum. The new URL for this blog is
so please update your blogrolls and posts. The old Blogger-based Cerulean Sanctum will probably continue to exist for the rest of the year, but will be shut down eventually. I’ll be putting a redirect here in a couple weeks just to drive the point home. Any links you have to the old blog will work for a while. I haven’t figured out how to redirect them all, so I’ll probably just put in a generic redirect via 404 to the root level of ceruleansanctum.com. Commenting at the old blog will be turned off as well. All comments from the old blog were ported over, so if you had an exceptionally pithy statement, it will live on in the new blog. RSS and Atom feeds are being modified as well, so if you read via an aggregator, you will have to update those links also.
RSS - http://ceruleansanctum.com/feed/
The Wordpress-based Cerulean Sanctum will be a huge work in progress. I jumped the gun a couple weeks ago by giving out the new domain name, so the cat was out of the bag and any opportunity I had to work on the new blog in secret was blown.
Sadly, despite the fact that the Blogger>>Wordpress import went well, Blogger post titles don’t play well with Wordpress’s titling. Many links in the new blog are therefore broken. I’ll have to fix each one manually and that will take months. However, one of the reasons I had to redo Cerulean Sanctum was due to directory structure issues that made accessing old posts through API searches nearly impossible. So while links within posts will be stuck referring to the old blog, over time they will be corrected. For the time being, searches will work instead. Six of one, half dozen of another. In the end, better search capability is more important.
You’ll see new posts pertaining to the Christian purpose of this blog soon at the new site. I may repost some classics for a week at the new blog. We’ll see how quickly the design and link issues clean up. An extraordinary amount of work lies ahead. Thank you for being a reader. Your patience is requested. In a few weeks everything will be back to normal, I’m sure.
God is good…and I’m tired!
Blessings.
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How to Botch a Blog Transition—In Other Words, Help!
April 24, 2006
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Technical Feedback : 8 comments
Folks,
As you know, I’m in the midst of a major blog transition. I’ve discovered a few things about my supposed wisdom of Web-based things, and that is that I have no idea what I’m doing. The problem is that one mistake leads to a cascade of others and the next thing you know you’re going over Niagara without a barrel.
I had to move this blog to a new host. That went fine! But then the mistakes started:
Mistake #1: I told people to switch to http://ceruleansanctum.com because that was the new domain name. Unfortunately, I jumped the gun on this. By handing out that domain, now everyone gets to see the Wordpress transition before I wanted people to see it. So instead of being able to work on it behind the scenes, now it’s essentially live and in a state of utter “un-setup-ness.” If I had kept quiet about that URL, I could have done things nicely. Now people have two URLs and there are links out there that are pointing to the old blog and some to the new.
Mistake #2: By exposing the new domain name early, I have redirect issues. If I put a redirect here now, then my Google ranking for the site gets hosed (and for my purposes that ranking is important to keep). Anyone who can help me understand the best way to do a redirect while maintaining a good relationship with search engines, well…I would love you forever!
Mistake #3: I hoped the Blogger import into Wordpress would be a piece of cake. Using the new Wordpress 2.0, the actual post content and commenting transition was a breeze. The files came over just by putting in my Blogger username and password into the Wordpress import feature. Presto, change-o, and Cerulean Sanctum was now in Wordpress! I added a plug-in to do universal string replacement (so I could change URLs to feature the new http://ceruleansanctum.com URL) and changed the permalink structure of the blog to mimic Blogger’s directory structure so every link would be good—or so I thought.There’s only one problem: Blogger truncates post titles to form the URL (and elminates articles) and Wordpress does not. That essentially whacks every link I have within the blog!!! Aaack!
This is what it looks like: The old Blogger permalink for the post that explains the meaning of “Cerulean Sanctum” was at: http://ceruleansanctum.com/2005/07/enigma-of-blog-title-explained-in.html
The new Wordpress import of that post is permalinked at: http://ceruleansanctum.com/2005/07/the-enigma-of-the-blog-title-explained-in-living-color/
Anyone know a way that I can fix this without having to repair every single link within every single post that referenced another post?
So that’s where I am! Help! I hope I can get the blog right within the next week, but my freelance work is keeping me busy (thankfully), so this is turning out to be a more ugly transition than I’d hoped. Thanks for hanging in there. In the end, this will be a better blog for these changes, but for a while it’s going to be a mess.
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Getting Ugly…
April 21, 2006
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Technical Feedback : add a comment
Folks,
Things may get ugly. I’m in the process of moving this blog to a new host and into Wordpress. Already, the “one-step” Blogger to Wordpress importer choked on about a quarter of my posts, so I’m not sure what the next step is. They simply didn’t import.
Bear with me. This typically winds up being harder than I’d like it to be! The site may vanish this weekend or you may see construction ugliness.
Have a great weekend and look for a whole new look here soon!
Blessings.
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