• Two Days Off To Hack

I took two days off work hacking. I mean hacking code, not coughing.

I've resurrected my  three no-longer-functioning MT-based blogs into new editions using WordPress.

It was an interesting exercise. Had to spend some time grokking PHP.

I chose different design theme for each of the three blogs, which means learning three different template structures all based on PHP. And every theme needed a hack.

There are still some tweaks I need to make this weekend. Like making the "previous" link on the very last entry link to the newest entry in the old MT blog. This will make the transition seamless, I hope.

But it looks pretty good.

The difference between WP and MT is that the WP pages are generated dynamically everytime you call one up. But MT generates static pages everytime you add a new entry. So the MT pages are still there on the server.

The WP pages are totally dependent on the viability of the mySQL database. Should that get corrupted, or the mySQL server be down, no pages. I understand that there is a utility that will generate a snapshot of the blog in static pages. I just have to find it.

It was fun spending two solid days with just one project. I was even dreaming in PHP at one point.

It's also interesting to see how the three programmers who created the three themes I'm using solved the same issues in three very different ways. But still I was able to borrow features from one theme and insert it into another.

The photo blog is the most complicated. That may be because the designer/programmer is German. Many of the comments in the code are in German, and I had to translate some of the content because it wasn't all fully localized for English.

Once I got a blog looking usable, I switched over by adding a webserver redirect via the site's .htaccess file. This tells the webserver, for example, to redirect  rchrd.com/blog/index.html to rchrd.com/blog/wp/index.php, and that makes the blog live! I also made redirects for each RSS feed.

Two very productive days!

http://rchrd.com/blog

http://rchrd.com/photo

http://rchrd.com/mfom