This page will be moving. Again.
I started this thing on Blogger. I only wrote about 20-30 posts before moving it all over to Weebly. I’ve spent the last several years posting at least once a week to weebly and now I’m moving again. It’s just not the right platform for what I’m doing.
Last time the move wasn’t too much of a problem. A couple dozen posts ranging anywhere from a few hundred words to just around a thousand. That was mostly just a copy and paste job. Well, copy, paste, and change some links and image locations.
Now I have added more than 400 posts. A dozen short stories. Some interactive fiction. I can’t really copy and paste all of that. I couldn’t even begin to imagine manually fixing all of the images and links.
Weebly doesn’t offer a great way to download blog content so I had to rip my own site from their servers in a really clumsy way. It kinda of sucked, but I have all of the content sort of in a messy pile. Now I have to organize that pile into something I can put up again. So, what to do, what to do?
I wasn’t about to do it manually, so I wrote a program. A pretty simple C# program that sifts through the pile, pulls out each of the over 400 posts, dusts them off, updates the image locations, repairs as many of the links as it can, and writes them back into cleanly formatted new files with the proper names and dates. It isn’t a complex program, but I don’t really write this sort of thing so it was a bit of a challenge. It took the better part of a day to make sure that the resulting posts contain the bare minimum of errors. On the upside, it only took about a day. Trying to move them over manually would have taken ages and I can’t imagine how monotonously soul crushing that task would have been. Just taking the chance that I would accidentally read an old post was too much to risk.
I still have some organizing and design cleanup to do before I can fully move the site over to its new home. When that happens I will post again to mention any changes to the RSS feed. I have two or three bugs to squash before the full move but it should be no longer than a couple weeks away.
I started this thing on Blogger. I only wrote about 20-30 posts before moving it all over to Weebly. I’ve spent the last several years posting at least once a week to weebly and now I’m moving again. It’s just not the right platform for what I’m doing.
Last time the move wasn’t too much of a problem. A couple dozen posts ranging anywhere from a few hundred words to just around a thousand. That was mostly just a copy and paste job. Well, copy, paste, and change some links and image locations.
Now I have added more than 400 posts. A dozen short stories. Some interactive fiction. I can’t really copy and paste all of that. I couldn’t even begin to imagine manually fixing all of the images and links.
Weebly doesn’t offer a great way to download blog content so I had to rip my own site from their servers in a really clumsy way. It kinda of sucked, but I have all of the content sort of in a messy pile. Now I have to organize that pile into something I can put up again. So, what to do, what to do?
I wasn’t about to do it manually, so I wrote a program. A pretty simple C# program that sifts through the pile, pulls out each of the over 400 posts, dusts them off, updates the image locations, repairs as many of the links as it can, and writes them back into cleanly formatted new files with the proper names and dates. It isn’t a complex program, but I don’t really write this sort of thing so it was a bit of a challenge. It took the better part of a day to make sure that the resulting posts contain the bare minimum of errors. On the upside, it only took about a day. Trying to move them over manually would have taken ages and I can’t imagine how monotonously soul crushing that task would have been. Just taking the chance that I would accidentally read an old post was too much to risk.
I still have some organizing and design cleanup to do before I can fully move the site over to its new home. When that happens I will post again to mention any changes to the RSS feed. I have two or three bugs to squash before the full move but it should be no longer than a couple weeks away.