Meehawl 2.0

Well things have been busy. I moved me and a bunch of crap from the east coast to the west coast of the United States of America. When I got my driving groove on, I managed to pass through a different time zone each day, which was pretty funky. And I finally managed to update the damn creaky Blogger content to WordPress. This was no trivial task – in the early days the Blogger account I had did not allow titles. So I had a bunch of H3 tags that had to be stripped and truncated into titles. Then I found that Blogger’s export sucks. And along the way, during its years of frequent server crashes, it seems to have managed to corrupt many entries, replacing plain ASCII text with non-Latin crap. Because my comments were done in an ancient “dotcomments” format, I had to import both Blogger and the comments into Movable Type (because the dotcomments guy wrote a workable dotcomments->MT import script). Needless to say, MT chokes on spurious characters. Then when that was done, I had to export from MT so that WordPress could import, because MT is so last year. I did all this on a server that has been moved and is no longer set up. Then when I set up the MySQL database on the remote 1and1 machine, I find that WordPress’s export function has silently truncated its data (I suspect a php timeout, as usual). Luckily I had also taken a MySQL dump of the entire schema, so with a bit of editing I was able to FTP that over and import it, re-creating the original
MySQL WordPress. So I think that, finally, all my posts and comments are here. Until I figure out how the anti-spam thing works, I have turned off commenting.

Tomorrow I start the first day of medical school indoctrination (that is, pre-term). We’ll see how that goes…