[ARGH. I foolishly clicked away from this input window and lost about half an hour of creative work on this post. RRRG.]<\/i><\/p>\n
Okay. I have a plan. Which won’t work.<\/p>\n
I’ve bitched <\/a>about my WIST <\/a>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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n And MT can handle all the templating\/appearance, and page generation, too, and its “convert breaks” function is just what I want. Cool.<\/p>\n Except I can’t do that, because then I couldn’t extract the stuff from the MT pages into my sig file program.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Okay, prob.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n And Access’ report function sucks chunks when it comes to outputting flat text, since it’s so “conveniently” WYSIWYG.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Rrg.<\/p>\n Of course, I’m about to become the Big Manager of Many Rogue Access Programmers. Surely I can pick one of their <\/i>brains about this.<\/p>\n Okay, so I have a new <\/i>plan …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [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….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wist"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2429,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2002\/06\/26\/rfq.html","url_meta":{"origin":203,"position":0},"title":"RFQ","author":"***Dave","date":"Wed 26-Jun-02 9:06am","format":false,"excerpt":"I have a quotations database which I call WIST (Wish I'd Said That). I keep it online here. It's a pride and a joy and a pain in the ass...","rel":"","context":"In "Quotations (WIST)"","block_context":{"text":"Quotations (WIST)","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/wist"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5913,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2004\/06\/30\/letter_writing.html","url_meta":{"origin":203,"position":1},"title":"Letter-writing","author":"***Dave","date":"Wed 30-Jun-04 11:08am","format":false,"excerpt":"Post up the most recent versions of quote-by-authors-whose-last-names-begin-with-the-letters A-F in my WIST quotations database. Yee-hah....","rel":"","context":"In "Quotations (WIST)"","block_context":{"text":"Quotations (WIST)","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/wist"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10293,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2007\/02\/22\/wist_update_2.html","url_meta":{"origin":203,"position":2},"title":"WIST update","author":"***Dave","date":"Thu 22-Feb-07 2:08pm","format":false,"excerpt":"I've posted a long overdue update to my WIST quotations database. I hadn't updated the stuff there since August 2004, largely because it's such a pain in the ass. I've...","rel":"","context":"In "Quotations (WIST)"","block_context":{"text":"Quotations (WIST)","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/wist"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11431,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2007\/08\/29\/wist_report.html","url_meta":{"origin":203,"position":3},"title":"WIST report","author":"***Dave","date":"Wed 29-Aug-07 8:57pm","format":false,"excerpt":"It's been a bit over a month since I rebooted the WIST (my quotations database) site, and it's going well -- visits are up decently, and I've been getting...","rel":"","context":"In "Quotations (WIST)"","block_context":{"text":"Quotations (WIST)","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/wist"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":13147,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2008\/07\/09\/6000ish.html","url_meta":{"origin":203,"position":4},"title":"6000ish","author":"***Dave","date":"Wed 9-Jul-08 2:24pm","format":false,"excerpt":"As I noted over there, (though it got swallowed up in the RSS feed), my WIST quotations database rolled past 6,000 entries in the past week or so. Which,...","rel":"","context":"In "Lord of the Rings \/ Hobbit"","block_context":{"text":"Lord of the Rings \/ Hobbit","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/media\/franchises\/lord-of-the-rings"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":13393,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2009\/01\/01\/quotes_by_the_numbers.html","url_meta":{"origin":203,"position":5},"title":"Quotes by the numbers","author":"***Dave","date":"Thu 1-Jan-09 11:20pm","format":false,"excerpt":"I went and ran the numbers on my quotations database, WIST, yesterday, the first time since February 2007.\u00a0 I'm currently at 6600 quotations, vs. the 5100 I was at back...","rel":"","context":"In "Quotations (WIST)"","block_context":{"text":"Quotations (WIST)","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/wist"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}