metaruss

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.