Currently Listening To: Can You Forgive Her- from the album "Very" by Pet Shop Boys
(Kindly disregard the totally discrediting iTunes choice, what can I say? I was feeling nostalgic)
I prostrate myself before this woman. For she has saved myself and probably at least 7 by-standers from a Blogger->Movable Type import motivated murder-suicide (trust me, I have some particularly sharp spatulas in the kitchen).
I spent ages going through my code and wondering what on earth was wrong with it. The error message itself displayed a sample of what the code should be, which was identical to what I fed into the CGI script. Then I read her post on the Movable Type support forum and fixed that issue. However I had failed to omit all the line break tags from my posts and they promptly gammed up the works. She swiftly pointed out that as a possible cause of my import troubles and I corrected it. The result being all my old blogger posts are online on this blog. I have continuity!
She was also kind enough to link me to a post on her own blog which talked about how to code a Photoblog. Looking at some of the ideas she used makes me think I might be able to automate further the snapshot window although I don't mind working it manually (well its not really 'manual' per se as I have a lot of scripts to do the dirty work now, but it certainly is more work-around than problem-solver).
I also worked a lot on my CSS for this site (cascading style sheets, for the less net-savvy, like fancy HTML). It may not seem much, indeed it isn't much but it took me a ridiculous amount of time to do. "Why?" You may ask. Well, that's simple.
Because I was working on my Style Sheet using an editor in my FTP application and every time I rebuilt this site using my new Style Sheet, Movable Type, ever so helpfully, wrote it's own Style Sheet over my toil. Picture if you will, a man hammering a nail into a plank of wood and then, imagine another man on the other side knocking the nail right back out again and you will have a comprehensive understanding of the scenario I unwittingly bumbled around in for a good 5 hours.
I am so glad this whole ordeal is over. By some standards this was a positively breezy domain change, (you can really uncover some bear-traps in that field of web-mastery) but I wouldn't want to go through it again, at least not without the knowledge I now possess.
As my Import script savior noted:
"np!!! I had a bitch of a time doing it myself and so I didn't want anyone else to suffer"
I wholeheartedly empathize with her position. If anyone at all has trouble with this I'll give them any assistance I can, by all accounts I got off lightly and I dread to think what a mess this site would still be without her help.
Posted by John Swaine at November 21, 2003 03:10 AM | TrackBack