Getting There
Well, the old Movable Type blog is more or less officially closed now, with a note on the door to come over here. I will only be posting new stuff at this location from now on, at least until I decide to put the WordPress blog into the main directory… a decision for later. For now, bookmark this page… or just go to the main page of the old blog and let it redirect you here.
One major hassle will be redirects. Because the old blog did not use blog post numbers for entries that were deleted, and the new blog failed to respect that numbering, the numbering no longer matches. Ergo, the utilities which usually manage redirects will not, in all probability, be of any use to me. Seems foolish–after all, who doesn’t have at least one deleted entry?
Worse, I can’t even redirect the easy way–the redirect utility provided by my web host can’t handle question marks, which WordPress uses. In addition to that, the search engines will continue to send 70% to 80% of my visitors to me… to the old site’s pages. Hell, I don’t even know if the search engines scan and link to WordPress’ php-style pages the same way they do with static pages… they must, right?
Then there is the formatting. As you can see, I have gotten most of the page to look OK, but bits and pieces of the base theme I used are still peeking through. I have to rework stuff like blockquotes, comment background coloring, the footer on the pages, and so on. Please be patient with me while I go through this.
In the meantime, please keep dropping by!
Hello
I’ve enjoyed your blog for a long time. Today, there is a message on the top of your blog TELLING me that the browser that I use, the one I’ve used for years, is somehow not good enough for your site..inferior. I need to get Firefox, you say.
I really could care less if I’m ‘seeing’ your site correctly. Firefox does not display some sites correctly either, but that is not mentioned.
Well, I don’t want to change my inferior browser to please your pretentiousness.
So, take care.
The temporary design was easier to read than the old design so I was hoping you’d keep the white and blue design you initially had up. If nothing else, you may want to change the font to another as it’s too “fine” and hard to read, particularly as grey on grey. The old font was okay at large sizes but the new one doesn’t get any darker at large sizes.
Becky: that’s not me, that’s the person who designed the theme I used as a template to design the site. I didn’t even know it was there until you mentioned it, and have no idea how it looks on IE. Frankly, I think it’s pretty stupid for a theme designer to build in stuff like that. I will take it out as soon as I can figure out how to…
Shari: Sorry, I just hate that design that the blog came with. Aside from not liking the style itself, the fact that so many people use that design is a strike against it–like working at a company where everybody gives PowerPoint presentations that use one of three or four popular templates, it becomes tiring and numbing, to me, at least. I prefer to keep the style I’ve had.
As for the text, I agree with you that it was too small, and have increased the size. However, keep in mind that text size varies greatly from computer to computer. When I first designed my blog, I had to deal with people complaining that the text was too big <em>and</em> too small, as well as other contrasting criticisms and preferences. Probably now I’ll get someone complaining that it’s way too big on their screen. However, I like the size I have reset to.
That said, I find your gripe about text size a little ironic, seeing as how the text on your blog appears smaller on my computer than the size I had mine set to. Yours is bold and more contrasted, but I always find it too small. My solution is to simply hit Command-plus a few times each time I visit. I know that you can’t really increase the size with the design set as it is–with the narrow column. Why do designers still restrict the column width like that, anyway? I may be harsh, but if a person is still using an 800×600 monitor, they really should upgrade the dang thing…
As for the colors, I prefer a low-contrast theme. Yes, it’s gray-on-grey, but it’s dark-grey on light-grey, enough of a contrast I would think… unless different computers display the colors in a different way. But again, your own blog has a similar contrast, in reverse–light green on dark green. I don;’t think that there is that much of a contrast difference, really.
Maybe it’s just that my eyes are sensitive, but I find high-contrast pages incredibly annoying, particularly white or bright-colored text on a black background. After-images start developing and my eyes start to hurt. Your page is non-contrasty enough so I have no problems. Many pages, however, have such stark bright-on-black contrasts I either just stay away from them, or, if I *really* want to read them, I select the text to produce a lesser contrast (the way I have my select color set, that is).
There… I think the IE message is gone now. Anyone sees it anywhere, let me know!
It’ll take you a while, but I suspect you’ll wind up loving WP. The plugins are slick, the anti-spam thing works great for nearly everyone, and while the WP community has its spats, it generally has been moving forward.
There’s a few plugins I’d suggest you take a look at. Most of these, I’ve poked around with to some extent.
Feedburner feed replacement: http://orderedlist.com/wordpress-plugins/feedburner-plugin/ I’m not even really sure how feeds work, to tell you the truth- but this plugin works well. 😉
WordPress Reports: http://tantannoodles.com/toolkit/wordpress-reports/ This one is huge. Links up to your Google Analytics account (and if you don’t have one, you should) and puts the code into your pages for you. From the admin panel, gives you the basics of the data that GA has for you.
Now Reading is an okay one for managing your “now reading” list. If I knew more about how to format pages and such, I’d probably have a really slick version of this for my library. Find it at http://robm.me.uk/projects/plugins/wordpress/now-reading/
And then of course there’s plugins for pictures. For a long time I used (and still do use) Iimage Browser for simple pictures I want to integrate into blog postings. http://fredfred.net/skriker/index.php/iimage-browser
But I’ve also lately installed a Gallery setup on my webhost for my photo albums, and have also put the WPG2 plugin into WP. It’s pretty slick and again if I knew anything serious about CSS, I’d probably integrate it all into my site more seriously.
Odds are this post will be moderated because of all the links, hopefully you see it. I might try and email it to you as well.
You know that on the Options->Permalinks tab in your WP admin panel, you can select what kind of URL to use? And you don’t have to use one that uses question marks, which might solve your problem with redirects.
I emailed you another comment that had several URLs in it- that’s generally something that gets comments flagged by Akismet. You might poke around in your moderation queue to see if you can retrieve it, or check your email.
I didn’t design my web site. It’s a template that came from Blogger. While the font size may be small at some resolutions, it’s not fine or thin.
However, you did mention some time back that all web sites look too small on your iMac screen because the screen is so huge that everything appears tiny at the fixed resolution the screen is set at (and we both know LCDs are fuzzy at interpolated resolutions).
I do hit command + + to make the fonts larger. As I said, the difference is that I said the font is too *fine”, not too “small”. When you make it bigger, it’s still harder to read than the font you used previously because it’s too delicate.
I didn’t have an issue with your old font but, if you like this better, so it goes. I’ll refrain from offering such feedback in the future as it seems you just take it as an opportunity to attack the poster’s site design rather than as a constructive comment.
I had the same problem when I decided to change the URL naming conventions but didn’t want my search engine ranking to go down. So after creating all the new entries I rebuilt all the old pages using a http 301 redirect. It works great and I would recommend this method.
http://www.isitebuild.com/301-redirect.htm
Umm… didn’t mean all of that as an attack, Shari. Sorry if it sounded that way. Getting off to a bad start, I am.
As for the Blogger design, I’m aware of that–I mentioned it indirectly a few times. But if I’m not mistaken, they allow you to modify the theme, same way that I’m doing it in WordPress. You have to fig into the CSS and figure out how to change stuff. I did also mention that the narrowness of the pre-designed format was what was forcing the small font size, and noted that your font was boldface. They were not meant as attacks, but as contrasts. I used the word “gripe” rather poorly, though. Sorry.
As for the font, I could have sworn that I had kept it the same… but it appears that I substituted Georgia with Garamond. Trying Georgia now.
Paul:
I should look this up; right now I am using Google Analyticator, which places the Analytics code in each page (and apparently allows tracking of non-html files as well), but does not have the analysis tools you mention.
Good idea, but for a later date. I’m not sure I would keep it recent, though it would be a lot easier than the hand-made version I had before.
These I’ll have to look into… but it seems that there are so many widgets and plug-ins, I’ll be busy sheafing through them all!
Yep. Saw that, was considering how to use it, and decided. Now it’s changed.
Thanks for the recommendations!
Roy: thanks for the tip! I have changed the naming convention here, and will look at the link you gave. Nevertheless, I think I will still have trouble making connections between the two sets of posts, seeing as how WordPress numbered them sequentially, and MT left blanks where posts were deleted.
Hey Luis,
On my computer (MacBook) the font is much bigger than it used to be. Not that I had any problem reading the old font. I mean, it’s so much bigger now; are you trying to imply that I am getting old, and can’t see well, so I need such a big font just to read your blog? You have a lot of nerve!! Who do you think you are???? I’m telling mom about this…
K
PS Sometimes on the internet(s) when people are just kidding around, but you can’t see their faces because the web pages are all in the way, you might think they are serious when they are not, and then get all mad and offended and send some really mad emails (or blog comments) to them and then they will get mad and send some mad emails back to YOU, and this can get really out of hand, and I think there’s a name for it because I know it has happened, maybe several times…
My point is that I was just kidding in this comment, and that I’m really not even mad at all! It turns out it was just a joke! Even the part about telling mom!
I thought about putting a small message in parenthesis right in the mail, saying (just kidding!!) but you know what they say, if you have to explain a joke, it’s not funny. That’s why if people don’t get my jokes, I don’t explain them, because then they wouldn’t be funny, instead of the person just not having a good sense of humor…
Love, K
Sorry Luis…I admit I was having a bad day anyway and then I come home from work to read my favorite blog and the little blurb about using IE just hit me the wrong way. Besides, as I said before, I don’t care. I don’t come here for the design, just for the words. You would have to live in a hole to not know that websites are viewed differently on ‘all’ browsers, not just IE.
So, I didn’t leave (how preposterous would that have been anyway….I was in a bad mood), and I accept your apology.
I used to use numbers in my URL but found that it is not as intuitive as using the title. To do the conversion I did the following. Keep in mind that I did this inside MT so I don’t know how you would do that from MT to WP
1. I changed the archiving settings to use “basename” instead of “sequential” Made sure to increase my basename character count to 300 or so and then to separate the words using hyphens rather than underscore (personal preference)
2. I rebuilt all the new posts in a new directory based on category. Previously I have everything under archive. So it looked like q-taro.com/archives/0000123.php and the new structure is q-taro.com/blogs/how-to-name-posts/
3. After rebuilding the new posts and checking to see for it that succeeded. I created another individual archive template that had only the redirect script in it. Where the redirect URL goes I put in the MT tag for basename.
4. Then I changed the archive settings back to the old sequential method and rebuilt all the posts again. These posts replaced the old posts in the old directory. They only contain the redirect script now and will redirect to it corresponding new post in the new directory.
5. Then changed the archive settings back to the way they were.
With this method you don’t have to worry about all the embedded crosslinks inside your posts. The old links will do an automatic redirect to your new URL. It works but you still need to keep all those old pages on your server.
If WP has generated the basename in the same way as MT than it is possible to do this but make sure to back up your old templates.
Hope this helps!
Roy: whew! Looks like a lot of stuff… and I think I am stuck on #1. I used MT v. 3.17; is the basename archive feature something that came in a later version? Because I don’t see the option in my controls. Should I upgrade before doing this?
Let’s say I can get to those controls. I still will be missing many steps. For instance, should I know what the redirect script is supposed to be? I don’t see an MT script in the “301 Redirect” page you referred me to. Where do I get that from?
If I understand your directions correctly, the redirects will be based on the URL based on the blog entry names, which can then be matched with the WordPress entry names, if I change the permalink system to that style. Correct?
Last question: although I see that you then rebuild the old numeric archives, I don’t see how the numeric archive files get connected to the named archive files so they can redirect to the WordPress archive files. How does that work?
THANK you for the help!
Luis
I thought about this a little more and I think your case is alot easier than my case and should be approached differently since you are moving from MT to WP.
301 redirect is an HTTP directive that tells search engines that a page has been moved permanently. This is preferable to a META http-equiv=”refresh” directive.
Since you used .html for your blog posts I think you’re limited to using an .HTACCESS file. Most script languages have directives to do this on the server side but since you used HTML you can recreate these pages with the directives like I did.
With the .HTACCESS method, basically you list all 2500+ posts you have and the corresponding new URLs in a file. When someone comes to your site looking at an old link it will redirect to the new one. Easy. You can create a simple one using the samples here and see if it works first. Just manually add a few lines to see.
http://www.isitebuild.com/301-redirect.htm
If that works than you can attempt to make a complete redirect list.
I think it is actually easy to create this page. If you use the same numeric indexing in WP then it will be impossible to match it. But if you rebuild your WP site using descriptive basename URL then it might be possible. The basename is automatically generated in MT and entering into the database whether you used it or not. WP should have a corresponding entry in it’s database. Most blogs on the internet use basenames in the URL because it is more intuitive and also when you are looking at your weblogs you can instantly tell what pages people are accessing rather than trying to figure out what the entry for 0001234.php was about. (BTW, I think there’s some mistake in your current URL structure. It has /index.php/ in the middle) I’m assuming that when WP imported your MT database it either imported the basenames or created new ones. I’m not familiar with WP, sorry.
Anyway, one thing to check is whether the basenames are truncated or not. The default setting in MT was 30 chars so some of my titles were cut off. I had to manually change these base names. But before you do that you might want to create the list of URLs and REDIRECT URLs.
You can do it this way. Create a new template which will generate a file like list.html or something. In the template, you add the MT tags that will loop through all your blog posts and print out the tags you want.
Something like this:
redirect 301 /archives/.php ///
Which will spit out a page like this:
http://blog.q-taro.com/list.php
Then you make sure the basenames on your WP build matches. In theory most should match but in reality some will be truncated. In which case you need to change the basename in both MT and WP database and then rebuild both your WP site and this list.
Then once you are sure it is perfect, you just copy and paste this page into a text file and upload it to your server and name it .HTACCESS.
That should work although with such a huge file it might slow down your server. I can’t be sure as this is not the way I implemented it. If it works you can delete all your old files without worry about getting a page not found.
Good Luck!
Also, don’t forget to do redirects for category and date archives pages too!
Luis, I just wrote a long long post about how you can do this but since it contained some tags it might have not been submitted properly. I’m too tired to write it all again…