Life of Brian

Only about 6 miles from where we live an early morning train accident has killed eight people (so far)and sickened hundreds. (Story)

As you can see I have managed to import the previous 6 months worth of the Rant and the Diaries. Things have sped up considerably since yesterday. I had all 36 months worth of the rant archives to go through and even using the replace function in MS Word it was taking way too long. Until I downloaded a freeware program called BK ReplaceEm. This puppy is more powerful than I can ever figure out, but the beauty is that it will do several replacements over a group of files in one click. It took a while to set up, but once I got it going it corrected 95% of everything that needed to be fixed. The rest was done by hand in Word. When it came to the Diaries I set up the archive files as year, so I only have 3 big files to fix. I’m still importing them in 3 month groups just in case something goes hinky it will be a manageable fix.

I may have to work a little more on the template here before I import more. The category archives come out with out the space between posts. In the date based ones, only the first post on the page is inside a box, the rest just run across the background.

And at point am I going to exceed the limit of posts in my database? I was getting all kinds of db crashes a year ago which is what prompted a change to Pivot. I was blaming that on the fact that I didn’t have access to a MySQL db at the Barndoor Fan Club web hoster, on mr-miata I do. Is 2500 going to be too much? I guess we’ll see.

Well the first one took me 55 minutes, but that included setting up a test weblog in MT and a couple of aborted imports because I had a few glitches in the file setup. They should go smoother from now on.

OK, I have been mucking about with the templates of the old Daily Rant in hopes of getting some sort of output that can then be imported into Movable Type. If you go over and take a look at December’s archive page you will see what it looks like. There is still a lot of cleaning up to do. Of course all the links to posts inside the Rant are worthless, but the outside links survive. The Pop-ups are toast too. I managed a way to salvage the comments, but someone pointed out there were a few bon mots in there. It is still going to take some time in a word processor to clean up the file before it is ready to be imported.

That amount of time will tell if this project is worth it. If it takes 20 minutes to do one file I then have to multiply it by 12 months then times 3 for years and finally again by 2 for the two blogs.

As I said before there is no easy way to export the entries from Pivot so that MT can digest them. I may try and do it manually. I think that I may lose the comments though, not that there were hundreds of insightful bon mats to save…

I have about 1050 entries in each of the Rant and the Diaries. Couple that with the 500 or so entries in PLOG and we are up to 2500 entries. PLOG will be easy as it was (is) done in MT, so it is a simple matter of exporting and then importing them back in here. You’ll know I have succeeded when the archive list grows and the post count per category climbs.