. Spinning .

Finally forced a friend to read one of my latest stories and judging by the response, I think it can just go in the file.

Been scan-reading some of the 5000-plus posts as I’ve been putting in the images and making all the necessary tweaks required by the move from Typepad to WordPress and it seems that in some ways I’ve lost a part of me in the voice. There is a freshness to the old posts, an honesty. Even as there is an improvement in the overall style and language, something is missing from my writing now.

What I’ve noticed is a lot of poetry–a lot of poetry–in the early postings. While I haven’t gotten a great response to my poems, though I’ve a couple published, I’m also taking into consideration that I don’t get a lot of response or encouragement to my writing from those who know me and have come to depend more upon new readers for a reaction. There is a distancing in online writing–weblogs, social services such as Twitter, MySpace, Facebook–that build that fourth wall of artistic separation, turning readers into an audience. And when you’re sitting in a crowd, the actor doesn’t know you’re there and not applauding.

So on to reading literature that spurs my instincts rather than just reading for the sake of it. That, and drawing in the circle a bit tighter.

Well, there were quite a few ways to solve problem #2, that of moving the images from the Typepad blogs over to the WordPress sites, none of which were easy.

Since Typepad makes it impossible to export just the image files, which I could then save, and import into similarly named files, I really have to pull them out one by one. The problem with my images were also that so many of them are named “screen-capture.jpg” that I don’t know what would end up where, even if I did manage to organize the file structure the same and then change the permalinks to them.

What I’ve found to be the easiest then is to go through the weblog online (not through the post list since that reverts back to the first page) or I could do it through the export.txt file created during the export. Then I click the image and save the image as a jpg on my hard drive in a folder by year under the appropriate weblog. I’ve also come up with a system of making sure they’re going into the right post by renaming the images with the date and category: 020208nm.jpg would be February 2, 2008, New Media.

It’s going to take quite a while, but I already have January 2009 files done for both, and 2008 for Hypercompendia which has more images than Spinning on an annual basis, though Spinning’s been alive three or four years longer.

Still, I won’t be blogging at the Typepad sites anymore, continuing on here and hoping that everyone is willing to change any links they have to my old sites and in particular, links to particular entries.

This has been taking up all my time, all my brainpower, all my reading since I bravely embarked on the great migration to WordPress. I’ve upgraded the WordPress platform to 2.7 with no problems, remembering to save the old wp-config.php file amd the themes. Fiddled around with some themes while I was setting up the sidebar and ended up back with K2 Beta, but then upgraded it to K2 RC7 and find it remarkably easy to work with–except for one quirk: I cannot find the color blue code on the links to change them after looking through the CSS over and over again and changing any numerical (usually 3-digit) or spelled out color anywhere on the sheets.The new K2 is widget-friendly which has made the sidebar setup amazingly easy.

Got around the WordPress limit of importing no more than 2 megabytes of files (my files were 9 mb) by changing the php.ini file to reflect a larger limit of 15, and also by lying to the WordPress menu and naming a .htm file a .txt file and using the mt-export.txt  method.

All this stuff was done with Hypercompendia as well, so the sites are all ready to go except for two problems. One is the transfer of all the images (possibly need to do them one by one) to wordpress because even though the images are there, they are being pulled from the Typepad sites.

The other major problem is the permalinks which don’t transfer. While I’ve managed to fix the permalinks internally, in other words, the permalinks on the WordPress site do point directly to WordPress, I cannot seem to find good directions that work in this particular instance with this set of circumstances. Some of the great ideas are too old, some of the directions don’t apply to my particular setup. I’ve tried three plugins so far that sounded promising except they redirect from within the weblog itself only, not covering external links to the old weblog. Yes, I can certainly tell everyone I care about to change the site addresses, and I certainly don’t care about my Google ranking, but there are a few sites like Wikipedia, a couple high school English classes, various sites that link to a particular series on a work of literature or a review of software, and somebody in Poland who has graciously posted a review and links to the downloads of my own hypertext work.

So that’s where I am right now with this project and I can’t really put it aside both because of WordPress’ renewal date coming up and more, because I’m liable to forget all the mumbo-jumbo I’ve read in the past five days (believe me, you either get vague help or too much information but I’ve studied it all and tried most of it till my brain is fried). So it’s going to be either I figure this out and delete the Typepad weblogs, or I drop WordPress if I can’t find my way around the problems or learn to suck it up and live without a blogging past.