New Year, New Blog (2008)
I shall be blogging here henceforth. I have moved all my old articles over from my previous uboot.com blog.
The reason for the move was multiple:
- It's important to use the software you write, to experience its successes and limitations. I am a contractor for uboot and have been using their blog; however I am also a contractor for easyname and in December we took the hosting features online we'd been developing in 2006. I'm glad to report they work just great!
- I wanted more control over the design. The text was small at the uboot blog and didn't invite reading.
- I have discovered hierarchical categories! So one can view just my software design posts for example. They are cool. Did uboot have them? If so, I never found them.
- I wanted a facility for seeing new comments without checking all posts over all pages, and comparing the current number of comments on that post with my memory of the previous number of comments.
- Trackback wasn't fully working with uboot. Although I suppose in the time it took me to set up my own blog, I could have repaired the uboot feature!
It wasn't easy easy as I had hoped to set up this blog. I imagined just FTPing over a WordPress installation and that would be it. While I don't want to sound ungrateful to the open-source programmers who made both the blogging software, and the hosting software possible, there are a sufficient number of small problems – both in implementation and in architecture – with the internet, web servers, web protocols, and in every piece of software, as to make the seemingly simple process of installing some blogging software annoying and time-consuming. I am writing this at the end of the second day of full-time work creating this blog.
- My plan to import my own data was to import the RSS feed from the old Blog. However, that RSS import software had three separate bugs. I have fixed these problems now in the source, and will submit them in due course.
- The RSS importer didn't use an XML parser, but instead regular expressions. Thus it required an
<item>tag to look exactly like<item>; whereas the uboot RSS feed includes attributes of the item tag, i.e.<item x="y">. So it didn't match and simply reported that it had "successfully" imported 0 posts. - Newlines in the HTML content were turned into
<br>characters. My HTML content had a lot of newlines (that's how the gmail WYSIWYG editor produces the content). These are ignored by the browser, so shouldn't be turned into<br>s which are not ignored by the browser. I solved the problem by replacing all newlines in the HTML with spaces, before the<br>conversion happened. - HTML escaping was being performed needlessly on the article titles. The titles were already in HTML in the RSS file. So """ text was introduced into the user-visible titles. I know the RSS feed is correct in this regard as it renders correctly on Google Reader, Bloglines, etc. I have removed this conversion.
- The RSS importer didn't use an XML parser, but instead regular expressions. Thus it required an
- Alas I lacked sufficient knowledge of CSS so getting the style correct was a great pain. Yet I didn't have particularly ambitious style requirements, as any viewer of the new blog can confirm.
- One problem that took ages was the removal of some two-coloured vertical lines. Were they images? Clever CSS borders? I couldn't find the border commands in the CSS file but also couldn't find any image commands. Nor were they referenced from the HTML file. Finally I checked the images directory and found an image; then full-text searched all files. I found the image referenced in a
<style>element at the<head>of one of the HTML files. - Various IE7 problems. I even had to insert a "if browser=IE" Javascript in one place.
- One problem that took ages was the removal of some two-coloured vertical lines. Were they images? Clever CSS borders? I couldn't find the border commands in the CSS file but also couldn't find any image commands. Nor were they referenced from the HTML file. Finally I checked the images directory and found an image; then full-text searched all files. I found the image referenced in a
- All embedded image references and intra-blog links had to be changed. (I couldn't even just leave them pointing to the old blog, as they were relative links, i.e.
<img src="/x/y.jpg">so didn't work after the new content had been imported.) - I created a ".htaccess" file to password-protect the website while it was under development. Later I deleted the files. However WordPress had written some rules into the file (without it being obvious to me) so that URLs like "/post-name" would be mapped to the correct PHP files. So after I deleted the ".htaccess" file to give everyone access, the blog no longer worked (it took me some time before I discovered that, as the URL "/" still worked; so it was not obvious which action had led to the pages stopping working)
- Let us not forget that the syntax of ".htaccess" and ".htpasswd" files is far from obvious in the first place (But thankfully my hoster has a tool to write this files – actually I wrote that piece of software!)
- I tested the RSS feeds from the new blog in Google Reader just at the moment when the .htaccess file was broken. Thus, Google Reader cached an non-working version of the page with 0 posts. And as Google Reader shares that cache between its users, I knew that anyone trying to subscribe to the feed would see the same thing. It's fixed now though (by time).
- I'm sure there were more problems but I can't remember. I should have written them down as I was working; after all, the probability of me not writing a blog entry about the difficulties of installing the new blog software were clearly not particularly high.
So essentially had I not been deeply familiar with PHP, HTML, Javascript, .htaccess files, FTP, XML and (to an extent) CSS, I would not have made it. This is not something I would recommend for "Aunt Tillie".
Anyway, now it's done, and as I now maintain this software in contrast to before, I look forward to also having to fix it when it breaks randomly in the future (as inevitably software always does).
Here are some screenshots (taken some years later)
