Categories
blogging

Fancy Meeting You Here

This is pretty much here for archival purposes. Practically forget it exists. No fingers lifted, right? Until you’re hacked! So now we’re on a newer version of PHP, which supports the newest version of WordPress and kills the old Expression Engine version of the earlier Blogblivion content once and for all barring special measures (manually adding posts here or finagling a site together of the static pages – 150 of them – I saved to have it in viewable form, not just database entries and memories.

Everything in WP was hacked. Even the lone clog that was already on the latest version after being hacked a couple weeks back without all this company. Unless the hosting has completely gone south, it seems that it’s some combinations of PHP version, WP version, updating themes and plugins, and finally figuring WTF it was on about with refusing to use HTTPS to load the blogs. You have to set the URL to that in the WP settings! Done across the board. I’ll update every password for everything for good measure along the way. This is the second blog with shiny new WP today. The third one on the hosting worked after changing PHP. I deleted a handful of specialty blogs. Easy to fix on the one hand, but more things to deal with on the other. Only a single one is completely cleaned of the crud – mostly hidden links in the posts. This one has almost 700 posts. It’s either go through every post and edit the ones affected, or do the same basic thing through MySQL. It appears that the stuff trails off by around halfway through, or did in a blog with a fraction of this number of posts. Posts near the beginning are more likely to contain more than one. Easy but tedious and slow. I’m hiring one of the kids to help with some of it. Deb’s old crochet blog was affected, for instance.

I really didn’t want to take the whole thing down. Even the places I took down may see content placed elsewhere or may return in the end. This is the early years of the kids. That’s why I carefully saved and organized 150 web pages worth of the early Blogblivion content that I knew I couldn’t keep from crashing when PHP was updated.

Anyway, until one of us goes through it, you should be able to see the weirdness the hack caused if you pay any attention at all to some of the subsequent posts.

Categories
Uncategorized

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Categories
blogging Geekery Money

Here Goes!

I am about to make a backup of everything, purge the original Blogblivion blog, setup WordPress, crossover some recent posts and make sure there’s a prominent pointer to the archived old blog.  Then I’ll crash into bed as I already should have by now.  Tomorrow I can tweak some of the details, in between errands and trying to keep the gas and electricity on at least until the baby turns a year old (not sure why they want to turn it off if I don’t pay or make arrangements by 5:00 tomorrow, considering they already have the info).

If all goes well, very shortly you won’t see this post at all, and then you will, on a different blog in the same location.

Update:

It helps to stay awake!  Really, here goes…

Categories
Birthdays

Happy Birthday

To blogger Chablis.

Categories
Birthdays

Happy Birthday

To blogger Army Wife, who is 38 today.

Categories
Birthdays

Happy Birthday

To blogger Rave.

Categories
Food & Cooking Medical Totally Random

Woohoo! 248 Going Once…

Won’t really feel the love until I’ve seen it on the scale at least twice, but this morning I was 248, down 2 from my prior low, for an even 60 pounds lost from my high, and 50 lost this year.  Still, I did a double-take, having not expected it, stomach sick or not, metabolism racing from way too much coffee yesterday or not.

Categories
blogging Geekery Kids

Are We There Yet?

I haven’t figured out yet exactly how to modify .htaccess to make permalinks to posts on this blog redirect to the same posts in the eeblog folder.  While I’m waiting for guru help – at least, I think I have former colleagues who may know the answer offhand and can cut me to the chase – I will probably go ahead and setup a new blog with WordPress, pointing prominently to the old blog and overlapping several recent posts.  That gets it done, and worst case I may be able to do the same with the other blog I need to work on, just to get it started, knowing the redirection is possible and just tricky.

I just hate to see any links broken.  Certainly not for long, even if it’s for the same of Google.

I also have a small client site update to do with static pages, which I am about to start so I can have it done and billed by Monday.  That ought to get me a check by the end of the week, even if it’s small.

I’m going to regret being awake now, but apparently it was a bad idea to drink seven mugs of coffee during the course of Saturday.  I was able to do very little on this with the kids, so hey, I can be a zombie for them and muddle through.

Categories
blogging Geekery

Test

This is a post made after a copy of the blog was moved to the eeblog folder.  Because they share a database, until I remove the original blog, this will presumably appear there too.

Categories
blogging Geekery Kids

Still Working On It

It was a rough night and has been somewhat of a rough morning.  And here’s Henry to stop me again!  Despite having his sisters for entertainment.

You may see less of a blip than I thought, if the migration works as I expect.  Stay tuned…

Categories
Birthdays

Happy Birthday

To Toni Carroll.

Categories
blogging Geekery

Administrative Notice

The contents of this blog, as published with Expression Engine, will be archived to a subdirectory, to which I will link when the dust settles.  At the address where this blog is now will be a new version, published using WordPress.  Thinking about it as I type this, probably I’ll replicate the last several recent posts, so there’s overlap and we don’t start completely empty.

The objective, which is supposed to be possible if moderately confusing, will be for any link to a post as it existed before to redirect automatically to the archived content.

I plan to attempt this tonight.

The goal is to work out the details on ours, so even if it’s undercooked tomorrow I know the technical hurdles, and then apply the knowledge to one I expect to do for another blogger tomorrow night.

During the surgery, you may find us down entirely for a while, or you may get an unexpected and incomplete site if you visit during the process.  I’ll post in both places indicating it’s done and how it went, once it is done.  Worst case, before I sleep tonight I will try to leave something in place that says what’s going on, even if the archive isn’t working yet and I have to continue with help from the kids during the day tomorrow.

Update:

Note to self… Good luck with that!  It’s 9 PM.  You just finished in the kitchen, have dishes soaking, have 3 kids to put to bed, and are going to start this from scratch when that’s all done?  On about 5 hours of sleep and after more than 13 hours awake?  Yeah, right…

Categories
Birthdays

Happy Birthday

To blogger Eric Scheie.

Categories
blogging Geekery Pictures

Little Devil

I needed a post with a picture so I can test messing with the RSS feed, and these were good ones.  This is why the VCR and DVD player are now on top of the TV.  This one he pointed defiantly, but he also does a full fledged “talk to the hand” as he did to me in the bath tonight.  He is so incorrigible.

Categories
Imported

Artificial Colors!

I managed to get a solid experiment in today to get an idea whether Henry reacts to artificial colors, which was the most logical reason he’d react to Kool-Aid and, ultimately, Country Time.  This would apparently be far from unheard of.

There is a Kool-Aid flavor, which happens to be an especially good one, that has no color at all.  They use that as a marketing coolness factor.  Maybe there are other clear flavors, but the one we’ve had is kiwi watermelon, and we had another packet.  I decided to make that the next one I made and to give the baby some, after reading the ingredients.

Nothing.

No.  Reaction.  Period.

If anything, he’s having an unusually calm day, except the runny nose in the morning from the diesel trains and/or honeysuckle or other growing things and/or wood smoke last night and/or dust.  He barely even got itchy as he tends to when he was ready to sleep again.  The itch sensation can cross and be confused with pain or unhappiness/discomfort, so he’ll itch, for instance, in response to tooth pain, gas pain, or emotional distress.

All he has had today has been a couple Club crackers, a piece of toast, and the clear Kool-Aid.  He’s napping at the time I’d have offered him more to eat.

He drank a large quantity, too.  When he steals Kool-Aid from the sisters, it can be little more than a sip to set him off, usually pretty quickly.  It’s gotten to where we infer he’s gotten it by his reaction.  I managed to keep theirs completely away from him, as they had the tail end of berry flavored blue Kool-Aid.

In a way, it’s onerous knowing that he reacts to at least two or three colors, but it’s also a relief to know and to be able to screen accordingly.

Categories
Imported

No Birthdays Today

Guess I’ll have to figure out what else to post.

Categories
Imported

Migration

I played with Expression Engine to WordPress migration last night.  It’s complicated.  You have to take the RSS feed, save it in a text file, import that into WordPress, and then do some other stuff if you want the comments.

It doesn’t port unpublished posts, like some redacted ones from earlier this year.  That’s fine.

The default is only 10 in the RSS.  We have, after this post, 2251.  Instead of 2249, Control Panel said we had 2030, so I used that number.  If you removed the limit from the RSS template, you get 100.  If you specify 2030, you get that, and actually the wait wasn’t that long.

A set that large hung at 349 when importing.  That means either finding a way to specify a range in an RSS template, or systematically grabbing a smaller number and then deleting posts and then grabbing the next so many, and so forth.

No pictures came through.  That may be a setting on the RSS template, allowing pictures to show in the feed.  Never had reason to look at that.

We do full feeds, but presumably partial feeds wouldn’t work for this.

Multiple categories per post aren’t handled gracefully, turning into one long string and creating a new category like “kids pictures tv” in WordPress.  Not sure there’s a way around it, but I think it might be wise to create matching categories in WP ahead of time either way.  Might be possible to do a series of queries or replaces or something.  Or just change every imported post to one category.

Apart from whatever URL customization is needed to make them match the old format, if desired, it appears to be a good idea to do the URL format setting to make them “pretty” before the import.

A small number of posts during the import, say one of every 30, claimed to have been imported previously.  I thought it was a URL building problem with duplication, but I had it at the default where they end in numbers, so it may have been the way it identified each post during import.

I’m still intrigued and would like to know just what it takes, but it may be that the better part of valor is to archive the old blog, even if it means hacking .htaccess to redirect permalinks, and starting with a fresh one.  We’d also considered that option.

Categories
Birthdays

Happy Birthday

To blogger That 1 Guy.

Categories
Uncategorized

One for the “No Shit, Sherlock” files…

Right here:

So, you ate less and exercised more and lost weight. But now the pounds are piling back on. You’re hungrier than ever, and you can’t seem to resist food. Once again, it’s all your fault, right?

Wrong. Blame evolution, and the fact that for the vast majority of human history, famine was a bigger threat than flab. Even your seeming lack of will power is part of a complex biological system that drives humans who have lost weight to regain it, according to new brain-scan research by scientists at Columbia University Medical Center.

Dr. Leibel also says that people should understand that regaining lost weight “is not free will. It’s biologically determined and the species that didn’t have this are the ones you see in the Museum of Natural History.” It’s only been in recent decades that this mechanism is contributing more to obesity than survival.

Um, yeah.

Categories
Imported

Can’t Believe the Degree…

To which I have come to dislike posting here because I can’t use an offline client directly.  Definitely time for a change.