WordPressilized

After a bit of work (about 4 hours) I’ve got my old blog entries imported into a wordpress database. I did it all manually through phpmyadmin. I could have also written a custom importer plugin. But since it’s a one time thing, it would have been a bit silly. I’m sure I made some minor mistakes but I’m not too concerned about them. Maybe the comment counts are off on some pages. Or you might see things like “-percent” in place of “%”, because I could have messed up when I had to convert my subject lines to acceptable slugs. Let me know if you find any issues and I’ll go back and fix them.

My blog has come a long ways from it’s original form. Initially I just wrote my “journal” all into one big file called journal.html. It started getting unwieldy so I broke it up into multiple HTML files. Then I learned how to use perl and I converted the files to plain text files to be read by a simple perl cgi script. Then after I started college my buddy kc asked me to install PHP on the high school server. Soon I had converted perl scripts to PHP. Later I converted all my text-file blog entries, into items in a database. Then I added a comment database so my friends could leave me messages. After that it’s pretty much stayed the same until now. I continued to make small improvements (image gallery, captchas, cms).  I’ve also had to transfer the database between servers more than once. And now I’ve finally stopped using my own home-brew solutions for what is now called blogging. It’s a bit sad to see it go. After all I put a lot of time and effort to it over the past 10 years. I simply haven’t had time to properly maintain the codebase. I do have time for minor hacking of code though. I’ve been doing that quite a bit lately on my other blog, “Taiwexans”. For now I’d like to go back through old posts and categorize/tag them. Many of my old blog entries would fall into the “rants and ravings of a madman” category I’m afraid. Looking back at some of my earlier college entries, I think that I’m a little more sane these days. At the least my later posts seem to be more mellow. Many of my old entries make me feel like Picard in this pose

That reminds me. I don’t think everybody knows this yet, but I decided that my Chinese name should be: 畢凱 (bì kǎi). I chose it for several reasons:

1. I think it sounds like “Coy B.”
2. 凱 (kǎi) is a nice character that means triumphant
3. I like the way the tones flow
4. But mostly because it’s also the way Picard was translated into Chinese 🙂