Back In Business
January 31st, 2010, 8:27am by MikeSo The Board is back in business, running on the most recent version of WordPress (currently, v2.9.1)! Upgrading allows us to move into the 21st century, giving the ability to do all sorts of fun things like better integration with flickr and twitter, as well as mobile versions of the site that were being clamored for by Kelvin and Jake.
It wasn’t easy, given that we were running on an 7 year-old version of Movable Type, and the migration tools to WordPress from that version were for at least 5 year-old versions of WP. The hardest part was that, because of the database structure, when a post is assigned an ID number, then subsequently erased, or a draft is not posted, the ID number is not reused, so that the resulting export of posts from MT was not necessarily sequential. Anyway, with use of text editors, messing with MT exporters (written in Perl, and not as easy as claimed here), Excel, and a program I wrote in Ruby, all 1,686 posts, 7,059 comments, and all the associated images are now in place and seem linked correctly. There may be some hiccups here and there.
Of course you’ll notice that the design of the front page isn’t what it used to be — right now it’s still the default (ugly) WordPress theme, and it’ll take a little time to get that back in place. On mobile devices, you should see a completely different-looking Board, since there’s a mobile version. I’ll get RSS feeds back up in the next day or two (maybe by the time you read this), and I’ll put them in the comments.
At any rate, welcome back! After all this, I hope that we actually use the Board a bit — it was interesting to see the post volume drop like a rock when we all started to use Twitter…
January 31st, 2010 at 10:51 am
Let’s see if Twitterfeed works for comments…
January 31st, 2010 at 12:55 pm
OK, looks like that’s working OK.
January 31st, 2010 at 11:14 am
Nice job Mike! I know the benefits of having a modern blog platform will contain both obvious improvements (mobile site, search speed) and unexpected surprises. I’ll be on the lookout for any bugs.
Quick question: did you set up URL forwarding for the old Board pages?
January 31st, 2010 at 11:17 am
It was really killing me that I couldn’t find our discussion about the Crunchpad/ JooJoo. Turns out, JooJoo discussion on Pyslent was one of those Twitter casualties. But at least we had a brief chat about the CrunchPad. I’m not linkifying this URL to see what WordPress does with it.
http://www.pyslent.com/?p=1633
January 31st, 2010 at 11:40 am
No, didn’t set up URL forwarding — I had to actually change all the links in all the posts to the new ID numbers/format (which I refused to do by hand, and is what I wrote a quick program to do). So there wasn’t any need for URL forwarding.
Still trying to figure out whether I can/should keep the old board running or not.
And yeah, like you said, the JooJoo/Crunchpad discussion was all on Twitter, unfortunately…
January 31st, 2010 at 12:30 pm
That should be OK. We don’t have too many links to the old pages out there.
Just thinking… on the old site, could you close comments on all the articles, insert a link at the top of each article to the new page, then republish it? No need to run MovableType since it’s just HTML. But might be handy for the odd link pointing back to The Board. Just an idea. Feel free to discard.
January 31st, 2010 at 12:37 pm
That actually would be pretty hard. I’m not aware of any links out there to pyslent posts (neither is google, from what I can tell), so if you have some, it’s probably easier to fix them on a case-by-case basis. Let me know if that’s not the case.
January 31st, 2010 at 11:41 am
Note the cool nested comments! 😉
January 31st, 2010 at 1:00 pm
It’s been a while since the last upgrade, eh? http://www.pyslent.com/?p=82 .
Minor bug: the post author isn’t displayed. Probably on the to-do list, but just in case.
January 31st, 2010 at 1:29 pm
Great work Mike! Loving the look of the mobile site– will have to check out the desktop version later on.
January 31st, 2010 at 2:00 pm
checking out the mobile site now. Very slick! Looking forward to the rebirth of The Board.
January 31st, 2010 at 2:13 pm
The author name will be added whenever the theme gets changed – I guess the general wordpress theme expects a blog with only 1 author.
Speaking of which, do we want the site to look the same as before, for posterity, or do we want a design refresh?
January 31st, 2010 at 4:47 pm
Somehow, in monkeying with the theme, all the old image links (internal, not to flickr, etc) seem to have broken. Will figure out how to fix later.
January 31st, 2010 at 6:30 pm
I’m partial to the old theme, but if that’s not easily recreated, why not just serve up this cool mobile theme to the desktop? Or make a pixel doubled version as a nod to the iPad :).
BTW, is there a direct link to the mobile site? Serena’s cell phone is going to the desktop version.
January 31st, 2010 at 9:54 pm
I’ll work on recreating the old theme, I like it, too. The one that’s active now is a first step (right column layout).
As for Serena’s phone — if you can get the user agent string, I can add it to the plugin so the mobile version will be served. There’s no direct link.
February 1st, 2010 at 10:15 am
So nested comments have now disappeared.
Also, is there a way to search comments? I think you had to search comments on the MT version. It’s handy sometimes, such as when searching for old posts about the CueCat.
February 1st, 2010 at 8:33 pm
Awesome – nice job, Mike. I like the look of the new site. Now all I have to do is re-learn how to post on it. Hope it’s not too complicated 🙂 BTW, how come no password needed anymore to post a comment?
February 1st, 2010 at 8:34 pm
I like the way it converts text into emoticons too 🙂 🙁 :p 😮