Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Update

Just before pushing the blog back onto the 757 server, I did a test build and noticed a couple things that will delay the push.

A quick "du -sh" check shows that the blog is 13GB in size!?? That's not right. Issue turned out to be in the rendering settings. Having the Blosxom script generate statics pages and encoding for xml entities adds a non-short string of 2525252525's to the link for each story. Setting $encode_xml_entities to 0 fixed this.

The content's life on other blogging systems played havoc with its content. I probably should have guessed that they'd re-encode various pieces but it's become a bit ugly. I'm having to read through each story (all 3000 of them) and fix paragraph tags, remove gratuitously inserted line breaks, and reset all non-standard character encodings.

End result is a delay and development of a strong opinion that anyone who wirtes custom markup languages for web sites (in this age of AJAX and CSS) deserves a sharp kick in the shins (both of 'em!) by someone wearing steal-toed boots.

Sunday, April 28, 2013

...and we're back!

Since Posterous has been acquired, the blog is falling back into its old haunts (those at 757). I managed to find most of the static-page-generating code that originally generated the blog (i.e., a highly customized Blosxom instance).The one thing lost by converting Blosxom to Wordpress to Posterous (and back again) is the Categories. I'll be debugging the code over the coming weeks, fixing various bugs as they pop up, and generally sorting posts back into Categories. If you see anything annoying, send me an email. (Note: stuff may move around a bit.)

In any case, I have a serious backlog of stuff to post. I just need to get back into the practice of writing short articles and posting them.