This is too funny; still unused to the format here at WordPress posting I tend to forget to select a category and that’s why if you’re following via feed you may see a lot of updated posts. But this: Not quite with it on the ‘tag’ concept and in my cloud, amid “Literature” and “Blogging” and “Reality” you’ll see “Add new tag.”
Well that was a messy upgrade to WordPress 2.7.1 and it almost had me give up not only WordPress, but blogging altogether. After three weeks of intense work on migrating Spinning and Hypercompendia from Typepad to WordPress, redesigning the stylesheets, the logos, etc., then tying up all the loose ends–and there are still several out there that can’t be knotted–Wordpress hits me with another upgrade from the one I just did three weeks ago.
It was easy to do, using the WordPress admin Dashboard panel to just press a button, but when I looked at the site, the logo was duplicated, running across the full width of the screen, and cut in halves there; the body was over to the extreme left together with the sidebar. (UPDATE): Also, the archives didn’t go beyond the first page because the “previous/next” page finder disappeared. Not that I liked it and will change it to show at the bottom of the pages instead as soon as I figure out how, but it was definitely a necessary thing. Going back to the K2 theme editor I found a notice that the K2 Revised theme had been broken so the weblogs had reverted back to K2. Going to theme page, I found a note that I needed to rename the file to K2-Revised without leaving a space. This I did in Lunar’s C-panel, then back in WordPress I selected the K2-Revised, and voila! got back the page navigation menu.
Luckily I had done some reading at the K2 forum so I knew the upgrade might cause some problems. Since I didn’t have a custom stylesheet made up but rather tweaked the originals, I had to copy some of the changes, upload the nightly K2 revision and rename it, change to that theme which fixed the column and logo problems, then had to re-enter all the CSS changes I had made for color and fonts.
Honestly though, between the redirect from TP to WP problems and this, I was ready to just call it quits forever with blogging.
Well that didn’t exactly work out as planned; even though I officially deleted the original Spinning, the files and permalinks remained because I had a new weblog named spinning, or maybe because the permalinks still linked to the spinning files and are being used by a protected backup.
At any rate, it’s not all bad; Google will bring a searcher to the right post (i.e., “The Road”) and that shows up on the ‘new’ Typepad Spinning, (rather than making it search deeper and find the new Wordpad Spinning post), but you can’t get any deeper than that, except to go to the ‘main’ archive from that page, and what you see there is the single post which notifies and redirects the move. If you attempt to go to either the post prior or after (they shouldn’t even be showing up there as options but they do), you get a ‘Password Protected’ notice.
It’s not the best link structure, but it’ll have to do for now.
Couldn’t redirect traffic from Typepad to WordPress for the weblogs so while I deleted the old Hypercompendia blog, I’ve been reluctant to delete the old Spinning. Without an easy method (one I can do myself) of fiddling with the Typepad templates to somehow aid in redirecting, I came up with a workaround that will help with external links at least–although not with specific post or category linking. Nor will it redirect searches, but all that means is that I drop way down in ranking and that means nothing to me. Students may have one less place to look for literary paper ideas. Here’s what it looks like:
What I did was rename the old Spinning weblog, create a ‘new’ Spinning weblog, and place only a single entry that will act as a redirect page, though you have to click the link. It’s better than nothing, and all old external links will end up at this page so that helps a bit–at least until my Typepad account expires.
Learning a lot about the various methods of internet communication; learning a lot about the people who use them.
“Georgia” is a warmer, more welcoming font than “Lucida Grande” so I’ve made that change at both weblogs.
I find that the access to great circles of people without the intimacy or bonding appeals to a certain personality type. Political persuasion appears to be a psychological influence on communication style and choice. With the wide variety of services such as blogging, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Diigo, Netvibes, Yahoo, just to name a few, there’s something for everyone. There’s a phenomenon of befriending by quantity, rather than quality, but that’s a trait that’s always been around in man’s nature. It just seems odd to me that anyone would care about having 7,000 followers or making any kind of reasonable attempt at following them.
But the world is large, and there is room for all of us in it.
Was easily able to fix the missing logo (not visible in Windows) by sending the image to a PC and then uploading it into the header from there. Of course I rushed back to the Mac half-expecting to see it disappear but it was intact. Don’t know why it didn’t originally show up on a pc or more likely the case, in an IE browser, but the problem is solved regardless.
While I was in there I also changed the font size in the body, enlarging it from 62.5% to 75% 70% to make it more readable. I suppose I shouldn’t mess directly on the CSS of the theme but there’s likely an original in the K2 folder on the hard drive if I go too far wrong. Besides, it’s too late by this time to either make a duplicate file or even a copy.
Still working on the problem of redirecting external links and searches directly from Typepad to WordPress blogs so that I can pull the plug on the old Spinning and Hypercompendia versions. Not really worried about Google, et al, but I’d like to graciously make it easy for those who so kindly linked to the weblogs or particular entries or categories so their links don’t end up at 401 pages.
Working on a logo for Hypercompendia. Also want to get those little ‘blog’ ‘about’ and ‘books’ links out of the logos here and there since they show up in the sidebar anyway–they’re really just another link to any pages created.
There are a few more things to upload here but I need to find the best way to enter them and where they should live.
Not totally happy with the typeface; still like Georgia and will likely fiddle with that at some point soon.
This has been a two-week effort and learning experience and I’m determined to be more creative and active with the inner workings of the sites so that I don’t so easily forget all the intricacies of stylesheets and codes. There’s so much I don’t know still but just feeling a bit more comfortable about playing with it is key to learning more.
While it seems a conflicting term, it is the result of technology banging heads with individual need; perhaps the fact that while innovation may serve the whole in purpose, it does not necessarily need to be limited to that purpose. For example, to use a social networking service as a place for notes, reminders, schemes.
In other words, I was able to set up a twitter account where no one will find me.
I’ve pretty much been told to twut-up on twitter as I was loading someone’s twit-roll with my constant tweets. I completely understand; the more folks you’re following the more likely it is that you won’t see all the latest from everyone without going back a-ways or you’re just ignoring them anyway. As must be the case with those who are listing hundreds or thousands of little friends and are interested in numbers–not people.
On the other hand, it was a method I used to keep track of the moves from Typepad to WordPress, and those extras on top of my rants, one-liner poetry, and other just-gotta-tell-ya’s, I suppose I was cluttering up some folks’ pages. So it’s either back to the copybook method of noting changes–I have the first notes from ’97 when I built a computer–or making note of some of the things done here at my own site where I am free to unravel. Meanwhile, my literature comrades are waiting for me to get over this and get back to lit postings.
What I might do, since twitter did serve me well in this function, is open another twitter account under an alias that no one else knows about. It might not be possible without making up another email address; I believe I ran into that problem before.
While pointing out my twitter-hogging has been a legitimate complaint in the pros and cons of social networking, it just seems that having to go back to the old ways is such a copout when so much internet communication is available and growing. The other possibility is to risk losing readers and that’s an option that’s out of my hands.
It appears that my nifty new logo disappears on the site if using IE as a browser. I wouldn’t have known except that I luckily have other pcs in the house and was using one of them.
I’ll try to fix this, but in the meantime, use your imagination.
While I like WordPress, it seems a whole lot slower than Typepad to get to the posting page and even to load the sites. Maybe it’s just a temporary quirk.
One thing from the move that’s helped already is the downloading all the images from the old sites onto files in my hard drive, and the way I have the photos set up: filed my year folders in my “Spinning” file, then each image was renamed by date and category of the post in which it appeared. While some image names were much more valuable identifiers, many of them were screenshots and named that way. They show up now as images with the date below so a quick scan of the file can usually help in spotting the image I’m looking for, and the image name tells me where it is on the site. From there it’s easy to go to the archives and as I’ve done in the post this morning at Hypercompedia, find the permalink to add. Very often it’s the image that comes to mind rather than a time period or a title.
Or maybe I’m just reaching to make myself feel better about three or four days’ work in manually moving those images!
Typepad recently upgraded and changed their post entry form and between that, merging a writing class weblog into Spinning, and my own dopeyness, a few of the posts here are listed as uncategorized. Real easy to make the change with WordPress. While in the Dashboard, pulling up the category file of “uncategorized” brings us to a listing on the actual site and it is relatively easy to make a change and repost. Though TP had features to do this, it seemed a bit more complicated and so I left things as they were.
Getting used to WP and basically I’m happy with the switch though there are still loads of tweaks and maneuverings to handle. It’s only been about ten days of intensive, dedicated involvement in the changeover but that was mainly because I had to figure out a lot of this stuff by myself or spend hours and days seeking answers. If you haven’t worked on the “inside” of a site for a while, and you don’t know more than what you’ve ever done, it all takes time. Hopefully I’ve learned a lot of new things along with relearning the old and will keep up the knowledge as I move along.
Just a note because I’m sure I’ll need this information long after I’ve forgotten how to do it.
When uploading a large file, i.e., media, and WordPress uploads gives a 2M limit, upload directly via Lunar’s cPanel into wp-content/uploads/2009/12 (or whatever year and month)
To upload it into a post, upload via the URL with the http://www.susangibb.net/(etc.)
I’m duplicating this post in Hypercompendia because I’ll likely need it there more often than here with audio, video, flash, etc. files.
There really should be an easy way for a weblog or any site to get into Technorati or Google or Yahoo or whoever and be able to make the redirect of a moved site right there. Anyway, I have to enter this for Technorati:
Wow, this program, Hyperimage, might do it in one fell swoop; grab all the images from a website and download them onto your hard drive. However, the one bad thing is that it still would not be easy to pick and choose them to reinsert them into the proper posts here at WordPress. While it saves time on the one end, on the other, as I pull them off individually I rename them to the post date and category so I’m sure they’re going into the right spots, and they’re filed in a year/month (if necessary) manner. However, if it retained Typepad’s file path structure intact, it might be a case of just taking off the .html and uploading them to WP.
Might be worth a try on the demo.
I think I have the redirect thing figured out, though I’m not going to touch it again until I have all the image files and their new permalinks moved here which should take another day or two. Remember, there are over 5000 entries on Spinning since October of 2003, and now that I’m going through them quickly, I’m glad I saved them and didn’t start a new identity. I wrote so much more honestly then.
On the permalink issue, WordPress configuration made the switch on the post permalinks but not the images or the external links. So the images I’m taking care of manually. The redirect from Typepad to WordPress, however, needs to be done on the Typepad site so that once it’s gone, the links will come out as a 301 redirect rather than a blank page. I have some code and a Movable Type template made up already for the redirect but just have to figure out where to stick it and I don’t want to mess with anything until I’ve gotten all the images and links transferred over completely.
Also learned something else here; while I do want to eventually move the published by, etc /comments/ line from under the post title to below the post, I really need to put in an extra blank line at the end of each post here to separate them out more clearly. Like this: (which didn’t work so maybe I’ll add a <br> in the html version)
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology