Impulsive

Out of sheer impulsiveness, I up and decided to move this blog from blosxom to wordpress. The new blog is here. I ended up looking at WP, digging the functionality and ease of use and deciding to switch. It didn’t hurt that there was a fairly painless way to migrate everything, including the comments, so why the hell not? Being able to set things like “moderate a person the first time they leave a comment” and such sold me. I spend increasing amounts of time duct taping the infrastructure of the blosxom setup so I’m going to give it a shot for right now.

I’m leaving the blosxom install in place for right now until I set up rewrite rules and such. The worst part of the switch is that it will break a lot of permalinks, sadly rendering them something less than “perma”. I think for the vast majority of them I can at least get them redirected to the correct day of the post being pointed to, but that bit will suck.

As of now, I’m disabling comments on the blosxom version, and asking folks to leave any commentary on the new blog. At this moment, I have imported everything from 2002 to 2004 into wordpress, pretty much without incident. I’m doing the final import right after I publish this post in hopes that I don’t miss anyone’s comments. I apologize in advance for any breakage this might cause and am soliciting any pointers on WordPress stuff and plugins and themes and what-have-you. The worst part of it all will be losing all my custom plugins that I’ve written for blosxom, but I’ll live with it. As I have time, I’ll work with the theme and put the graphics and such back in. For now, it is off to the future!

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dave

Dave Slusher is a blogger, podcaster, computer programmer, author, science fiction fan and father. Member of the Podcast Hall of Fame class of 2022.

8 thoughts on “Impulsive”

  1. Charlie says:

    Nice one. I use the same WordPress/Ecto combo and it’s pretty sweet. The next thing you’ll do is get obsessed with all the plugins available!

  2. Adam says:

    Looks like you’ve got the basics up so far… Feel free to drop me an email with WP questions. I’ve poked around my install and dealt with a bunch of things.

    -A

  3. ben says:

    do you know about this plugin?

    http://elliottback.com/wp/archives/2005/05/11/wordpress-hashcash-20/

    great to combat comment spam

  4. dave says:

    Ben,

    I’m going to hold off on things like that unless and until they are necessary. Since this version of the blog has only been up a few days, the robots haven’t found it yet. If I find myself overwhelmed I’ll look for something like this, but I am really nervous about anything that hampers the conversation. If 1 out of 10 people has problems posting with that plugin, that’s too much. I’m digging the communication back so we’ve got to optimize on that.

    Still, it is nice to know I have options if I start to get overwhelmed. Thanks for letting me know about it.

  5. Chris C. says:

    Out of sheer impulsiveness

    There’s the Dave we know and love 🙂

  6. Chris C. says:

    Ewwww, moderation!

    Ewwww, smiley icons!

    :/

  7. Chris C. says:

    Continuing my comment spam, you should add, below the textarea in tiny type, a note mentioning which HTML tags are allowed (thus implying that the textarea will break paragraphs only on P tags).

    Or maybe just a CR does it — this sentence will demonstrate.

  8. dave says:

    Chris, “Ewwww, moderation” is not something I expect to ever hear from anyone who has ever gone to dinner and come home to find 500 comments about levitra and/or texas hold ’em on their blog. The moderation is pretty mild, and is set up that after I approve you once your comments come through from then on. If you like, you can test it on this post. You know you want to.

    As for the tags, unlike the previous system this is more out of the box so I’d have to dig around to even find that out. Unlike blosxom, I’m finding that almost everything with WordPress comes out of the box configured how I like it or easily made thus. It’s a pretty sweet package.

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