vituperation

Robyn and I are in the process of consolidating our sites into one location, a virtual Linux server. Why? Because I know someone who owns a hosting company, and we were able to get this server –

And by virtual server I mean just that: it looks like a complete little Linux machine to me, but it’s really just a section of a much bigger and more powerful machine. Pretty cool stuff, all in all, because now I control everything about the server, so I can start and stop the web server on my own if I need to, or even “reboot” the machine, without having to call tech support. It’s like having our own machine for hosting.

– with over 10x the space, 10x the bandwidth, and full server capabilities, for about half what we pay at the other place.

That’s fucking cool.

In any case, that’s why the URL you got in your notify email looked weird. I haven’t moved the domain yet, so I have to refer to this site by its IP address until the DNS is configured and moved. This is a short entry because I’m still trying to get everything moved and configured. You may notice the site looks completely different. That’s because I’m using WordPress to power it, instead of writing my own PHP and HTML like I did on the original site. Please also note that I’ve gotten all my old entries and comments moved over here–

And please give me some props for that, because I’m insanely proud of the fact that I did it. Being a geek has its perks sometimes. To convert the old entries, I wrote several scripts and little programs to walk the old file structure and parse each entry to pull out the text and formatting, then spit out one big file that looks like it was exported from MovableType (WordPress can import MovableType entries). I then just imported that file into the new site.

Getting the comments was much harder, but also much cooler. HaloScan can export comments, 1000 at a time, into XML files. I wrote a big C program today to first extract all the comment information (entry name, timestamp, poster name, ip address, email address, web site, comment text) then to match the entry name pulled to the corresponding entry in the WordPress database. Finally, and this is the really cool part, this C program output a SQL script (SQL is a database language) which I fed right into mySQL (the database engine) to populate all the comments.

Shit like that rocks my world.

–so you can look around at them in lieu of reading one of my normal exciting entries.

If you’re reading this, you got notified via the mailing list, which I moved off the old site over to this one. Please leave me a comment below to let me know the list is working right. Take a look around, and let me know in the comments if anything’s broken. If you’d rather let me know via email, use fred.anders*n[at]gmail.com, where * is the letter ‘o’. Note: everything isn’t moved yet, notably the links blog. Please try to use the forums (which I also successfully moved, users and all, for my name is SuperGeek) and make sure they work (all I did was move them, I didn’t test them).

There are several things that make this site better than the other. First, you can register if you want to, so when you leave comments your info’s already filled in. Plus, I think once you register a name no one else can use it (but I haven’t tried, so I don’t know for sure). Second, I’ve installed a plugin that allows you to subscribe to the comments for a particular entry, so if you want, you can get notified whenever someone posts a comment on that entry. I don’t think you have to be registered to do that, but you do have to put in a valid email address. Third, my entries are categorized–

Mostly. I imported them all into one big “imported entries” category, and I’m going through them one at a time and figuring out where to put them. If you look at the “imported entries” category, you’re liable to find broken links. I fix those as I look at the entries, so there’s no need to let me know about them. Just let me know if something’s broken in one of the other categories, please.

–so now if you’re looking for something in particular, like a funny entry, you can look via category. Fourth, there’s a search function, so if you want to find out all the times I mentioned my penis in an entry, now you can. Fifth, it just looks better.

Note: The notify email you got may have said it was from an unknown sender. I’m still trying to figure that out, but I suspect it’s due to the fact that I haven’t actually moved the domain yet. Please also note that I will never sell or give your email address to anyone. I’m a privacy-respecting-motherfucker.

I’m having a lot of fun playing around with it, and I hope to add cool stuff as I find it. Enjoy your look around, and when it’s all up and going well, I’ll grace you with some pictures of the inside of my shoulder if you’re nice.