Greetings all, today is Labor Day, which is a paid vacation day at my place of business. So instead of going into the office I can do whatever I want. Funny that, I ended up spending close to 6 hours both finishing up that poorly written Metroid Prime and migrating all my Movable Type journal entries to this Wordpress blog.
The main bulk of that time was cutting out the 24,000 comments from prescription drug companies, magazine, and pornographic websites. After toying around, they were all posted on one article, so cutting them out was pretty easy.
Movable Type's exporting is quite amazing, by the way. It dumps all the articles into a text file They have a bizzare format, but it's still pretty readable:
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AUTHOR: dyre
TITLE: stuff?
STATUS: Draft
ALLOW COMMENTS: 0
CONVERT BREAKS: __default__
ALLOW PINGS: 0
PRIMARY CATEGORY: daily
CATEGORY: dailyDATE: 10/09/2003 08:43:39 AM
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BODY:
omitted boring emotional text.
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EXTENDED BODY:-----
EXCERPT:-----
KEYWORDS:-----
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Even though Wordpress is an annoying piece of crap, it has a convient "import from Movable Type" feature, which is very helpful. So Importing all these old entries really only took 5 minutes. 200 more articles in 5 whole minutes.. not bad.
Despite my best judgement, I decided not to cut out content related to my life at the time, so there's plenty of school related articles talking about how lazy I can be, what classes I was attending, what homework I need to do and also several articles talking about my girlfriend at the time.
All those personal articles really tappered off when broke up with her and took a 9 or 10 month break from the internet, so around April 2004 my articles became more about the subject I was writting about and less about what I did that weekend or how I felt about the crushing stress of finishing off a semester at Platteville. Paints an emotional picture doesn't it?
To fit all these new articles, I added a couple new categories, and also organized them into sub-groups. I also made an Opinion category for all my reviews, gamelogs, and impressions about various Games, Moves, Music Events and such.
There are still plenty of articles that predate installing Movable Type that I haven't gathered up, but I could easily make a program that would convert all those entries into a Movable Type backup file, and have Wordpress import them. Handy!
Many of these are very old reviews, but are still pretty funny.. like my Treasure Planet review, Kingdom Hearts review, and Magnolia review.. Now that I finished up Metroid, maybe that's what I'll work on.
Well, if you're really bored, feel free to go back in time and read all those articles. It's not like these haven't already been on the internet over at theschlock.com/journal, so you don't really gain anything new from reading them, unless you haven't read them. You'd probably want to use the Search engine and category trees to your advantage to finding the better articles though.
Some of my old reviews are kinda funny at least. especially my timely Metroid Prime 2 review.
by the way, NEVER use wordpress's entry edited for writing your blog posts. Wordpress uses some funky CSS and Javascript to make your articles look like they do after you submit them. BUT because of this, the text field is not longer a trackable DOM field. SO when you submit an article, the text is immediately whisked away to the HTTP request and the field is blanked out.
What does this mean? It means if you end up getting any browser errors, domain errors.. basically any error at all: You lose your entire post! I've had this happen to me enough, that I don't even use the editor unless I'm actually edited an entry.
I use Wordpad to actually write out all my entries, and then I just copy and paste them into the editor, hit save, and then hit publish.
I'm currently using Wordpress 2.0.4, so maybe they've fixed it, but I'm not taking any chances anymore. Especially when Firefox is somewhat buggy too and can crash at will.
Something to think about anyways..