Almost There! A Few More Tweaks…
April 29, 2006
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Technical Functions : Trackback,
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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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To reiterate a comment on the old blog, this new site is very attractive, Dan. You’ve done a nice job. I can’t imagine me doing what you’ve had to do; at least you have some tech knowledge and the confidence that goes with it, even though you sound stretched to the limit. It will be worth it when you’re all done.
Wow. All I can say is I’m glad I use MT.
Actually, I don’t know that would help. I just get the ‘Glad I use WP, it doesn’t have that problem’ thing so much, I had to throw that in there.
I feel your pain. MT plug ins are made with the same assumption that you know what’s happening. Sometimes there are no instructions and if there are they assume a lot. They are getting better, and with the newer releases of MT they’ve standardized the plugin install a bit, but I still feel like I’m flying by the seat of my pants a lot.
Sorry, I can’t help with the CSS thing. What do you mean my semi-transparent? Everything looks opaque to me.
Dan,
After you have experienced with all the pains of the Blogger-Wordpress transition and foreseeing that the Apple software may not come up readily yet -and affordable!- how would you recommend Blogger’s users to manage their blogs were they ever considering transition to Wordpress?
p.s. now, how is that for another technical post
p.s.s. why do I ask? I may start a blog in Blogger but not quite sure yet…
Dan,
Have you figured that some ot the characters in your posts don’t show up right? For instance
http://ceruleansanctum.com/200.....l#comments
The painter’s name can’t be read as it is…
p.s. Hope I am not adding more distress to you
Dave,
Thanks. I used the Regulus Theme as a basis since its general layout was clean and had a nice option for tweaking a few things in CSS. It’s widgetized, too, which makes sidebar management much easier.
Still, I was hoping for a 3-column layout, but only a few of those have been widgetized. Updating old themes and plugins in Wordpress appears to be nightmarish, so we’ll see.
I used ColorBlender to generate the basic colors you see here, using the Cerulean Blue color (in the comment background and elsewhere) as the basis. I tried this afternoon to rethink a few of those choices, but the CSS style doc I created also contained text size edits. The result was a mess because of the em size issues. That meant discarding the color changes. I’ll still fix that in the future, but I’m done tweaking for now.
Salguod,
I bypassed Movable Type because a lot of users screamed over problems in the last update. As you can tell, I don’t want problems!
The other issue with MT is they want to charge you more if you create a commercial site with it. Cerulean Sanctum won’t be commercial—ever—but I’m also setting up an author site and a site for my freelance writing biz. Both of those will be commercial. That meant paying for a commercial license. When Wordpress does about 95% of what MT will do, but for free, I’ll stick with free. Plus, I didn’t like how MT phrased their licensing agreement. I read it a few times and it sure sounds to me like they own the content created by their software, even if they didn’t create it. As someone who’s sensitive to copyright issues, that’s a huge deal. If that’s not what they mean to say by their licensing agreement, then they need a writer to write clearer copy!
Francisco,
I can’t recommend anything on the conversion from Blogger to Wordpress. The import feature is pretty straightforward and gives you no options at this point. The Blogger URL/post_name and article truncation issue is huge, but I see no way around it. I had no idea that the import would break image alignments and mangle non-English characters (as you duly noted in your second post. Ugh.) The inability to render them correctly is truly passé. (Looks like it’s only a Wordpress importation issue and not a Wordpress issue in general.)
When I started on MT it was completely free too - and there was no WP. If I was starting out now, I’d likely choose WP too. Now, I’ve got a lot of time invested in learning MT and I’m just stubborn enought that every “Hey, why not use WP?” comment I get makes me dig in with MT all the more.
I seem to remember the liscense issue you speak of being talked about somewhere and the response was that that is not at all what the mean to say. It’s a vague recolection and I have no idea where - or if - I saw it.
Francisco - I have a recomendation. Skip blogger all together and start with wordpress.com. Still free and based on WP. I bet the transition to WP on your own host would be seamless.
salguod: Actually, there’s no wordpress.com-to-self-hosted-wordpress conversion tools, period. You can use the RSS feed to move posts, but there’s no way to move comments (or anything else, for that matter.)
Dan: I hear you on the “Mac CSS Tools” request. Most of my CSS editing happens in TextEdit or Taco HTML Edit.
Any chance we’ll see you use the Popular Tags plugin?
Travis,
Will try. Earlier, I added the “Category Cloud Widget” which does the same thing, but it refused to format in the theme as a “cloud.” It just blew everything out into individual lines and weighted them. Kind of misses the whole point!
The nested comments I added look nice. Don’t know why the dates flash when you scroll, though. Must be a fixed background issue.
(Hmm… I never was able to get Nested Comments to work…)
Well Dan, it’s shaping up nicely. I’ll bet most of the problems you’re aware of aren’t even noticed by 85% of the crowd.
Oooh, pretty! I like the new look, especially the mountains.