Day: January 12, 2006

Crankypantsing, Meta

Template Tweaking

Shelly

I really didn’t like the way the sanserif font looked, so I spent some more time hunting for a basic template that was more to my liking. There must be twelfty million templates out there, but not one of them was even approaching what I had in mind. I finally decided to use the Cub Reporter template, and substitute my own graphics. It’s not exactly what I’d been visualizing, but I think I can live with it. The only thing I still need to fine tune is moving the WordPress link to the footer.

Now, the only thing that’s still wonky is that Sitemeter is pulling stats from both my old blog and the new one. Very odd. I’m assuming it’s just a latency issue, and that it’ll clear itself up in the next day or so.

So, guess who was born on this date?

A) Howard Stearn
B) Rush Limbaugh
C) The Maharishi
D) John Singer Sargent
E) Me
F) All of the above

Do you suppose this is a sign that the End Times are nigh?

Meta

Migration

Shelly

I struck out finding the perfect WordPress template, ready made, so I opted for a nice, crisp, clean one for the interim. It needs a couple of minor tweaks, but it was pretty much fit for public consumption straight out of the box.

This was a shockingly painless endeavor. There were a few minor kinks, but nothing serious. I wasn’t even tempted to throw things or tear my hair out! The biggest problem I had was of my own causing, so I can’t even complain about it. Typically, I tried to make things too complicated. I hunted around for an import tool, and found one that will handle comments. It involved doing the Hokey-Pokey, saying an incantation, lighting candles, and burning hekatombs, which, of course, I was incapable of doing correctly. I was about to give up, when I hunted in my WordPress directory and found that there was an import utility included. Wheee! It’s not working perfectly–it’s stalled out on me a few times, and I had to restart it–but so far it seems to be getting the job done. With comments. Except for June, which has gone walkabout. I’m going to try re-importing the whole shebang, as I can’t figure out any other way to import just one month. If that doesn’t work, I’ll have to move those entries manually, sans comments. (Hmmm, June seems to have imported this time around, but April was skipped. No biggie, because it was just an overwrite, so the original files are intact, but still, it’s kinda funny.)

When everything is finished running, I’m going to have to go back through my archives and try to reincorporate images for the early months when I was using Hello to upload photos. Those pictures aren’t importing, but that’s not surprising, as Blogger is not likely to want to share its bandwidth with a rival.

I’m also going to have to do something about the formatting on a lot of old posts, in terms of image and text integration. I’ve used a lot of floated images and tables, and they aren’t translating well, resulting in a lot of uglification of Teh Pretty.

There may also be something funky going on with the archives navigation buttons. I’ll have to take a look at that. The original template had built in Google Ad scripting, which I didn’t want, so I removed it. I’ve never touched a php file before, so that was a little nerve wracking.

But, it’s done. We have successfully moved and we are live!