. Spinning .

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.

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)

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.