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!
No tag for this post.
Posts
Comments
