Blog status, and looking forward to the next conversion

I’m pretty happy with where DDtB is right now, in terms of my WordPress conversion. There are still a few things I need to get done on it, but they’re mostly secondary priority:

1. The category archives are resolving a bit differently from the old blog. That’s annoying (and makes for some broken internal links), but, honestly, not worrying about it too much. Since the categories have sometimes changed, and for a long time weren’t really working at all, it’s not impacting all that many people (and as if folks do that much looking up here by category).
2. I would rather change the category (and monthly) archives to be full posts, rather than excerpts. And, to that end, I want to install a better pagination plug-in (of which there are several out there). Again, low priority.
3. There’s a lot of stuff that used to be on the sidebar that I’ve gotten moved ont the new sidebars There’s also stuff I haven’t moved that can probably be dropped. But there are some things I do need to pull over — Amazon wish lists, links to our photos, some other stuff.
4. Change the RSS link at the bottom of each post (individual archive) to point to the post’s RSS feed. Or else get rid of it (do any of my posts really get tracked by RSS readers?) and add in an email subscription plugin for each post.
5. Add a mobile view for the blog. There’s several out there that sound pretty slick — I just haven’t done the playing around.
6. Tweak the comment display so that rather than posting in alternating colors, my comments are highlighted differently from the other readers. I think that will be helpful.

So, again, no particular emergencies here at the moment. I just need to build a to-do list and tackle it over time (that’s the subject for another post).

The bigger question is who/what next. I do want to migrate my bigger blogs over from MT to WP, less because there’s a crushing need (with this blog off of MT, the impact of spammers has been greatly reduced) but because it will be less messy and I’ll only have to maintain one skill set.

I really want to move WIST over, sooner rather than later. Between the search functionality (limited), the posting speed, and some clumsiness in the implementation around how I’ve pushed MT to do some stuff, I think it would be a keen idea. There are also a number of plug-ins that I’m jonesing to add to the mix that would enhance the “WIST Experience.”

There are problems, though. Of course. Again, because I’m pushing the database in some odd ways (making extensive use of category descriptions, for example, for full author info), it’s going to take a lot of work to make it happen. Part of that is especially because the Movable Type to WordPress conversion routines really don’t do much with categories (losing the hierarchy and the descriptions) — which means I need to figure out how to do a more thorough conversion of that data — probably a combination of copying stuff over, then doing all sorts of funky SQL stuff to rebuild the hierarchy and bring over the category descriptions, etc. (Actually, on consideration, I probably need to do a more manual export of that data, then manipulate it externally, then import it to the WP setup. Hrm.  Maybe. Problem is keeping the keys lined up with the quotations.)

I need to learn more about the WP database structure, clearly.

I don’t even know if WP will plotz with the couple of thousand categories (authors) I have. I heard dire warnings about MT, but it seems to be working okay; will WP be more of a problem?

I also know that I will have to do a lot of template tweaking, both to change how the posts themselves display (category description as the title, then the post, then the title as the attribution), but also tweak the RSS feeds to accurately show things the way I want. Plus I have multiple category archive formats (by author, but also lists of authors) that I’d need to figure out how to juggle. All of which means learning a lot more about the templating setup.

Another problem is the permalink format I use, which are in the format  http://www.wist.info/t/twain_mark/026560.html. The category part is doable (indeed, the %category% tag in file links forces the whole hierachy), but retaining the post numbers is more problematic. It’s doable (from the descriptions I saw), but may be more trouble than it’s worth.

Because that raises the question of whether I should go to the effort of retaining the same permalinks. I have a few cross-references within the existing database (a quote that points to another, similar quote), but those can be fixed. More important is that Google and Yahoo (the latter more than the former) have both crawled my site, and since it’s a reference site, I really don’t want their links to break. The question then becomes, if I do break all their old links, how long will it take for them to re-crawl? If people come to WIST and it brings up its own WP 404 page, do I simply put a search form in there and suggest that people can look up what they were searching for.

Hmmm. To ponder.

The biggest problem is that I want to do this now, and it’s clearly something I need to plan and work on over a series of several days (or, more likely, multiple weeks). The only pain there is that then I either have to double-enter quotes for that period from the initial conversion to go-live, or else do two conversions. Since I expect the conversion is going to be a major pain in the patootie, I’m a bit reluctant to go with that course.

(Hey, listen to me — I sound like an application project manager. Go fig.)

On the other hand, it has to be done sooner or later.

In the meantime, what other blogs do I have to convert?

1. BD has done some research on the whole subject (at least looking at templates). I should probably work with him next.
2. Blog of Heroes is another biggie. I’m not feeling it’s as critical to move over at this point, esp. since it’s got a lot of internal linkage that will be a pain to deal with.
3. Margie’s Kitchen would be well-suited, though again not urgent.

The other bloglets I have in MT are either already converted, or are minor jobs at best, or can wait for a long time longer.

Just pondering. WIST remains high in my attention (since I deal with it daily). I suspect it’s going to be one of those projects I worry over in my brain until it springs forth in full fury when the time is ripe. Or some mixed metaphor like that.