Deadly Bloody Serious

QuickPost Wordpress Plugin - Version .4 is now available

So far, so good, except for the database error (wp_categories doesn't exist) under WordPress 2.3…

I'm much more likely to post to Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook than here. The environments are pleasantly slack: I don't feel like I have to write masses of highly insightful prose. 

Today, I noticed another key factor: their tools are optimised for speed of posting. You can tweet or tumble as fast as you can send an instant message. For whatever reason, I feel a lot more drag than that when trying to post in Wordpress. 

I've installed TIQPWP to see if it helps. Already, I've noticed one thing I like: when I hit Enter, I get a new paragraph rather than a line break. 

Result so far: first post in a billion years. Well, a month. Whatever.  

[Django Community Blog subscribers: if you see this, the administrator hasn't yet updated my feed. Sorry about that.]

My web host just rang me to ask me to upgrade WordPress. Some benefactor of humanity had used a hole in WordPress to turn his web server into a spam-bot, and he was going to get black-holed any minute. Rather than turn me off entirely, he rang me. How's that for customer service? I sincerely doubt I'd get that from, say, GoDaddy. 

Those few (perhaps zero) of you that read my site directly, rather than via a feed reader, might have noticed that

1. everything looks a little different; and
2. all of the old posts are missing.

The first is deliberate. I’m still trying to figure out whether the second is deliberate, too.

Over the years I’ve used a few different blogging platforms. I started with Blogger, which I gave up because I couldn’t make my own improvements to it. I switched to Radio Userland, which I gave up because it was too unpredictable a platform for me to make my own improvements. From there I switched to (and helped develop) PyDS, which I’m giving up because I want a platform on which I can’t make my own improvements.

To cut a long story short: I’m too old to stay up all night fixing bugs — just ask my poor Juice users. The tiniest problem can throw a six month gap into my blog. As I originally put it five months ago when I made the decision: “Uncle.” .

(As my mate Alastair might put it: I’ve had a geezer moment. Hey, Al! You’re #1!)

So, I’m switching to WordPress. I don’t have to develop it. There are billions of plug-ins. My ISP can provide technical support. Sweet.

I’m still trying to figure out whether or not to import all my old posts, for technical and content reasons.

Technically, the problem is mixed formats. My original Blogger and Radio posts have a lot of HTML in them, and most of my PyDS posts are in reStructuredText. So, importing will require some scripting work to pre-render those pages. That’ll involve development and bug fixing. See also: old geezer, above.

With regard to the content, I’m not sure that all of my old posts are worth the effort of recovery. It didn’t hurt too much to never quite import my old Blogger posts into my Radio blog, so maybe it won’t hurt too much to leave my old Radio and PyDS posts behind. I have no massive reader base to disappoint, either. Perhaps I’ll only import those that have active incoming links. Perhaps I’ll import those and some old favourites. Perhaps I’ll never quite get around to either.

At least, for now, I’ve got a working platform upon which I can write without hassle. So far, so good.

If your directory permissions start off a little too tight, Wordpress might start off with an empty .htaccess file. The first symptom I noticed was 404 results on archives and comments. After much random browsing, I blundered across this solution:

• Visit the Permalink options page (Options > Permalinks)
• Hit the Update Permalink Structure button
• Observe “You should update your .htaccess now” message at the top of the page
• Express great frustration that you’re not being told with what you should update .htaccess now
• Scroll down to the bottom of the page
• Thwack self on forehead

I might still try out Justin Blanton’s Smart Archives plugin, but at least now I’ve got the archives — and comments — working.

Okay, I give up. After a good decade of good natured heckling from Alastair that I obviously wasn’t cut out to either maintain a blogging system hand-carved out of rare wood or hand-carve a brand new blogging system out of less rare wood, I’ve told Stilgherrian to give up on my Django install and revert my configuration to its default so I can use WordPress instead.