Well, as these things always go, the WordPress conversion turned out not to be quite as simple as I had originally thought. Now, I expected that permalinks would be broken, so I went through and fixed all those (as well as some permalinks back into my old Blosxom blog that I never bothered to update when I went to b2evo). What I didn’t expect, was that all of my old 2-part b2evo posts also broke. Back in the day, I made liberal use of these using b2evo’s <!--more--> tag. The export process only extracted the text of the posts up to the <!--more--> tag, ignoring the rest.

WordPress has a completely different method of handling two-part posts using what it calls “post excerpts”. So, for now, just to pull these posts in, I just went through each one and cut-and-pasted the rest of the post from b2evo, separating the two parts with [More:], as b2evo would display them. It was a tedious, manual process, of course, but I only had to do it once.

So now, I think I’m entirely moved over to WordPress with no links to old blogs anywhere. Now I just need to go update my Wiki in a few places where I had permalinks.

Now that I’m using my blog again, I decided to ditch b2evolution for WordPress. B2Evolution has served me well, but I’ve never been crazy about its look-and-feel or its selection of skins. And, most of my geeky-type friends who blog, use WordPress, so I figured I would give it a shot.

Importing was easy thanks to these instructions I found.  Ironically enough, it was the same procedure I used awhile back when I converted from Blosxom to b2evolution:  export the existing stuff into Movable Type format, then import.

I really like the clean look-and-feel of WordPress, and it’s certainly much spiffier than the version of b2evolution I was using, although that’s not really a fair comparison because I hadn’t upgraded b2evolution since I installed it in late 2005.

In other news, I just registered lpaulriddle.com, which I’ll eventually use to house this blog and some other stuff.

 

I’ve always hated when links open in new windows (usually by adding a target="_blank" attribute). Except in a few very rare instances, there’s just no reason to do it. Firefox allows the user to disable this behavior, but the procedure is not very well documented, so it seems like every time I want to do it I need to spend 10 minutes searching the web. So, I’m documenting it here in my somewhat-neglected blog. This procedure is valid for Firefox 2.x:

1. Point the browser to about:config
2. Find the property browser.link.open_newwindow
3. Right-click on it and select “modify”
4. Change the value to “1”
5. Restart the browser

And there we have it. Another victory in the battle to make the web less annoying.

I just finished importing all my Blosxom entries into b2evolution. The process was more or less painless; I just pulled down all the Blosxom entries in Movable Type format using the flavor I mentioned earlier, then processed the result with a Perl script, then ran b2evolution’s Movable Type import utility to bring the entries in. The Perl script basically catenates lines together in the body area of each entry, which makes the result look more attractive in b2evolution. Once the entries were in, I went through and made minor edits to make things look better.

The only thing I don’t care for about b2evolution is its insistence on sticking <br> tags at the end of every line, even within blocks of markup. This makes it really hard to include code snippets, because I can’t use <pre> blocks; I have to explicitly format everything and use &nbsp; entities to do spacing. There must be a way to make this work right, but I haven’t found it yet.

That aside, it’s nice to have a “real” blogging engine with all the associated bells and whistles. I’m sure I’ll figure out all of b2evolution’s various quirks over time.

Followup — Looks like the <br> tag thing is controlled by the Auto-BR option at the bottom of the page where you edit posts. It seems to be turned on for all the imported entries, and off for the native entries. When Auto-BR is off, it seems to be much better behaved with embedded HTML in entries.

Made my first attempt at importing my Blosxom data into b2evolution this morning. Looks like it will be doable with just a bit of fussing. The basic strategy is to use this handy Blosxom flavor to convert the Blosxom data to Movable Type export format, then use b2evolution’s MT import utility to bring the data in. I tried this on a couple of entries, and it works, but I’ll need to do a bit of data munging. First off, the Blosxom flavor leaves an <h3> markup tag at the beginning of each post, which the importer doesn’t like. And, the importer seems to insist on sticking <br> tags at the end of every line, which makes for some ugly line breaks in the final product. There may be a way to control this behavior from the importer, but I think it’ll be just as easy to massage the import file with a Perl script. Next step is to do that, and try a few more test imports, before bringing in the whole enchilada.