I'm back… sort of…

January 16, 2006 8 Comments

Hello, all. I’m pretty much back in commission. I lucked out tremendously on the pain aspect of having all 4 wisdom teeth pulled at the same time. Other than a sore jawbone, nearly constant coppery-open-sore taste in my mouth and the dissolveable stitches poking my tongue when I talk, it wasn’t too bad of an experience. I still cannot really eat anything I want to eat and am still subjected to bland, soft foods. However, that seems to be getting progressively better every day.

Since my recovery went much smoother than expected, the time I had planned to use to read a couple of books didn’t exactly arrive as I had hoped. So you’ll all have to sit tight a bit longer until I’ve finished reading “Finding Darwin’s God” to know what I thought of it and how well the author did trying to convince the reader that yes, God the Creator and evolution can mingle at the same party.

The weekend also brought the arrival of a book I purchased earlier in the week, “Online Journalism – Principals and Practices of News for the Web.” Found it on Amazon.com for $49.95 + shipping, used Addall.com to find a cheaper brand new copy of it on Half.com and had it delivered to my doorstep in less than a week for $33.55. IN YOUR FACE, AMAZON!

I discovered yesterday that the official “stable release” of WordPress 2.0 has been out for a few days and comes with some pretty nice features. For all you MoveableType users who don’t want to pay for updates or anything, WP 2.0 comes with an integrated function to help you import your MoveableType (as well as a few other blogging CMSs) over to WordPress. Hopefully today I’ll have some time to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress, then I’ll need to update the Kiwi theme I’m using, reinstate the customized things I’ve tweeked and then fix anything I’ve screwed up along the way. Expect crazy error messages and the like during this change.

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The Random Thinker
  • http://www.sonic.net/jdf/ jdf

    Hmm, last time I gave that a try, the WordPress importer fell on its face, only importing roughly 1/3rd of the posts and getting all the timestamps wrong (yes, I tried a variety of published “fixes” to this problem as found by stfw). I’ll give 2.0 a whack, but I’m somewhat pessimistic.

  • http://www.sonic.net/jdf/ jdf

    Yeah, the import tool is still ass-like for my purposes. Oh well.

  • http://www.deguia.net Daniel

    That’s no bueno. What’s ass-like about it?

  • http://www.sonic.net/jdf/ jdf

    It apparently can’t handle 611 very lightweight posts with 892 lightweight comments. It also apparently needs to protect me from said 892 comments by not displaying them, leaving them in some form of bizzare comment purgatory awaiting individual approval. A quick search of the WP plugin repository doesn’t reveal a batch-approval tool, and I haven’t had a chance to see if I can easily approve the backlog through something relatively painless directly through MySQL.

    All this before even cracking open the theming/skinning/styling/presentation aspect? I’m just not seeing a lot of benefit at the end of this tunnel. Mostly I’m trudging through this excersize for the heck of it.

  • http://www.evilblog.net Ian

    Hasn’t WP had import for a long time? I switched over like a year ago, and it did importing then.

    A quick search of the WP plugin repository doesn’t reveal a batch-approval tool, and I haven’t had a chance to see if I can easily approve the backlog through something relatively painless directly through MySQL.

    I don’t remember how, but it’s pretty easy if you look at the WP source code to figure out the name of the comment approval field. You can do it in a single SQL command.

  • http://www.deguia.net Daniel

    I know for a fact there’s a batch-approve option. I use it all the time when I batch-spam things that slip past SpamKarma over the course of a few weeks. There are I think 4 options at the bottom of the MANAGE > COMMENTS page and one of them is “Select all as approved” or some working thereof.

    I’m not sure how much you want to tinker with it, but the WP support forums are superb.

  • http://www.deguia.net Daniel

    Well that’s dumb! I just noticed in WP 2.0 they removed that option. Maybe it has something to do with their built in comment anti-spam filtering…?

    Forget what I said a moment ato…

  • http://www.deguia.net Daniel

    Okay, i was partially wrong. The batch-sort options I was talking about in Comment #6 are located in MANAGE > AWAITING MODERATION.

    So, it doesn’t look like there’s a way to batch approve comments in general though.