[ARGH. I foolishly clicked away from this input window and lost about half an hour of creative work on this post. RRRG.]
Okay. I have a plan. Which won’t work.
I’ve bitched about my WIST database before. To make a long story short, I have a 5,000-quotation database in Access, but getting it published to an HTML page is like pulling teeth. Dinosaur teeth. Big dinosaur teeth. With tweezers. It easily takes a 3-4 days of dedicated free time, if not longer. So I don’t do it as often as I should — the online pages haven’t been updated in going on two years, even though the database continues to grow.
So, I thought to myself this morning, why not make it a blog. Export out of the existing database into MT’s import format, import the entries in, one entry to an author, cateogories being the alphabet. Then I can update this stuff on-line with no problem, and it’s all right there for folks to read as they like as soon as I’ve done it.
And MT can handle all the templating/appearance, and page generation, too, and its “convert breaks” function is just what I want. Cool.
Except I can’t do that, because then I couldn’t extract the stuff from the MT pages into my sig file program.
Okay, no prob. I can just continue to use the db as-is and periodically export into the MT import format and import the stuff into the blog, no prob.
Okay, prob.
I can’t use the easy, simple, quick sig file process I have, because that uses an Access query exported to a text file, plus a bit of editing on said file. But queries aren’t hierarchical — I can’t have all the quotes for one author lumped under that author’s name that way, only all the quotes repeating each author’s name and stats. I could do that, but it would be ugly. I could, maybe, get to just under the present functionality (all the “A” authors on one page), and simply rather than having big headings for each author have them in the citation of each quote — but that trades off exportability (up) for aesthetics and usability (down), and is still a pain — I’d really only have 26 (long) entries, one for each letter of the alphabet. I might play around with it, but I wouldn’t be happy.
And Access’ report function sucks chunks when it comes to outputting flat text, since it’s so “conveniently” WYSIWYG.
So I can’t really export from the db into the MT import format. Besides which, there isn’t an obvious function in MT to delete all entries and go back to scratch (short of checking off every entry for all 1600-plus authors), or import-and-overwrite. Which is probably the way I want it, normally, but is a pain in this case.
Rrg.
Of course, I’m about to become the Big Manager of Many Rogue Access Programmers. Surely I can pick one of their brains about this.
Okay, so I have a new plan …
Aha.
Until I pursue the New Plan, I decided I could try out the MT stuff I described above — do a query of quotations, let the query insert some styles and proper HTML codes, cut-n-paste into MT posts (one per letter), and let MT take care of the templates, search facility, etc. Cool, and I think the loss of some minor features from what I currently do will be more than made up by what MT gives me plus the convenience.
The Muse is poking me with her little pitchfork even as we speak …
Excellent.
I so did not follow the explanations above. No matter. I’ve been though about half the entries now, and an expansion would be appreciated.