metaruss

Wow, so it’s been almost a decade since I last posted here.  I’ve switched hosting situations multiple times in the intervening years and this site has suffered its fair share of bit-rot along the way.  I actually took it down at one point, as I assumed no one would notice.  It turns out there are a number of forums and whatnot that direct links to files in here, so I brought it back after receiving some frantic emails.  WordPress was hopelessly out of date and when I jumped to the latest release, it broke this ancient theme, a number of plugins, and there were also some problems with the DB due to its age (using a very old storage engine).  I thought all was lost, but I somehow got it going again.  I’m sticking to my guns on this highly dated-looking theme and I absolutely hate the new WordPress editor, but I found this plugin called “Classic Editor” that has saved the day.

So yeah, why am I even posting on here when I know no one will ever read it?  Mostly for my own posterity, I guess…and maybe the web crawlers will find these posts and show them on page 6 in their search results.  I’ve learned a valuable lesson over the past couple of decades: letting a few huge social media corporations hoover-up all of the discourse on the Internet and move it into their walled gardens has effectively ruined it.  A lot of the hobby-related discussions that had moved from email lists into Internet forums back in sepia-times have now moved into Facebook or Reddit.  Many of the forums still physically exist, but they’re mostly cobwebs and crickets and/or a fire hose of spam with maybe a few gray beards lurking here or there.  Facebook Groups are a terrible replacement for something like a forum, as it’s impossible to find anything and the same questions get asked over and over.  Alas, this is where we are now and I don’t see it ever turning around.

I stopped using Twitter about 5 years ago, as my feed slowly morphed into an AI stream of consciousness.  I was never into micro-blogging, but I used it as an RSS feed of sorts for the topics and publishers I was interested in.  Since it was no longer capable of performing that function, I started playing around with things like Mastodon…even setting up my own instance.  It kind of did what I wanted, but like so many before it (Diaspora, GNU Social, etc) it didn’t really work because no one was there generating content.  It’s the age-old problem of adoption.  That all changed in 2022 and now I find Mastodon does pretty much what I want thanks to relays and folks just plain-old posting there.  I do have a Bluesky account and that place feels a lot like Twitter did back when it was useful.  But I think we know the inevitable result will be the same once the VC money runs out.  I’ve also been playing around with Pixelfed and, thanks to the train wreck over at Reddit, Lemmy.  Something to be a bit excited about, at the very least.

Things changed with our previous data center such that it is no longer a viable option. Thanks again to iMav for hosting me previously. It was great while it lasted.

I’ve moved everything again to my own virtual private server over at 1&1. I’m done with shared virtual web hosting, as the database performance is horrid and the setup limitations are annoying (I need to host several sites). So far, it has been working great….

Thanks to the generosity of iMav at geekhack.org, I now have some real hosting for my sites.  So long, GoDaddy.

In other news, the new version of WordPress breaks an old plugin that I forgot I was using (PhotoJar).  I relied on its shortcode quite heavily, so many of my embedded photos no longer show up.  I will probably have to write some PHP glue to restore old posts.

Brought the MiniMopar domains and subdomains back from the dead.  What a pain.  I originally registered my domains with register.com.  They got sold-off somehow to an affiliate program and my domain management migrated to this random-sounding “northsky.com” site.  They have since gone away and I couldn’t figure out where to manage my domains.  I was getting charged for registration by a completely different company, United Online, which is some conglomerate company for lots of different post-dot-com companies.  They had no idea why they were charging me and register.com claimed no ownership of the domains in question either.  Anyway, I finally found that I could log into yet another completely different site and manage them.  What a pain.

While the “blog” part of WordPress is attractive for some things, there are still the more static parts of my old web site that I wanted to integrate somehow.  I tested a few different themes and settled on pixeled by samk.  I like the layout and how it uses categories to power the menu bar at the top.  I also like the color scheme and artwork.  It’s a perfect throwback to the old site.  Thank you, Sam!

I’ve taken categories further by using them as an engine to load static HTML pages and display them at the top of the first page in each category.  This more-or-less emulates the layout of what I had before.  It also allowed me to eliminate some cruft and reminded me about some things that need updating (not that I will).  Still making changes, but this will work for now.  Right now these static pages are stored with the theme itself.  I may decide to switch to WP pages instead, though I am not quite ready to give up being able to update them locally and batch-upload them.

Sam released his theme under the GPL, so I am posting my derivative here.

After some experimentation with the WordPress eXtended RSS (WXR) importer, I decided it was more trouble than it was worth.  The importer requires too many details to create usable posts out of the basic “log” entires on my old website.  Instead, I have taken the portion of Zack Preble’s “CSV” Importer that interfaces with WordPress, fixed the database query problems for categories, and adapted it to a simple XML parser.  Then it was a simple matter to write a Perl script that could parse the HTML and generate the XML files.

The XML tags are modeled after WXR and the following are supported:

<item>, <title>, <post_date>, <category>, <content>

Here is an example XML file.

Source

• simplewxr-0.1.zip

Trying various ways to import my static website without having to do it by hand.  Poked around with Zack Preble’s “CSV” Importer.  It works fine for short posts in plain text without carriage returns, but it’s a bit lacking for more complicated stuff.

Right now I am trying to write a script that will generate WPX RSS formatted XML files that are good enough to import directly into WordPress.

I’ve been resisting the trend to start a blog for almost a decade now, as I still sort of enjoyed “blogging” through the various esoteric corners of my old, vanilla website.  However, I am finding less and less time to fiddle with HTML though ssh sessions. My brain is also getting such that I seem to forget where I keep things.  This is my attempt to migrate the more useful parts of my partly living home website into a searchable blog-style site.  We’ll see how far I get before I give up!

The old Oil Filter Study page has been replaced by a new article: Oil Filters Revealed. It has received a major update to bring it inline with the current market, lots of new pictures, and some completely different filters as well. Many weeks of research went into this one.