Bagel Press

Testing out wordpress from iPhone. Yeah I have a damn iPhone. I still hate you apple.

so, after paying for a one month subscription to xanga premium for the ability to output files of my archives, i used this third party xanga importer for wordpress and just about pulled my hair out. nothing is ever just that simple, is it?

i won’t lie though, there is something satisfying about being an uptight nerd about things like this and wanting processes to work seamlessly.

problems began when the imports were all importing into the  year 1970. that would be incorrect.

also, it was only importing one entry from days on which multiple entries were written.

i looked at the code for the third party uploader this morning with fresh eyes and realized that the coder was using regular expressions to find the line “posted [date] [time]” and then taking just the [date] [time] part of it, and converting it to a unix timestamp using php’s strtotime() function, i believe to generate a unique identifier for each entry so that duplicates were not imported.

the problems were two-fold. first, i’m not sure if the coder was using a non-english version of xanga or what, but he did not account for the word “at” which is used in “posted [date] at [time]” and as such, when trying to pass strtotime([date] at [time]), php returned nothing, so i think some other timestamp was being generated which did not make unique ids for entries written on the same day. as a result, i had to use explode to cut the word “at” out of the “posted” line before passing it to strtotime().

still didn’t work.

then i realized that this dumb archives that xanga provided me with often had invalid times on them. most often, the minutes portion of the time would show up with only one digit, so the time posted would be something like “8:1 PM”.  ARGH! of course, this was also making strtotime() flip out, so i had to make php explode the time at the colon, then explode the second portion at the space, and then determine whether the remaining section had two characters, and if not, change it to a two digit number. (i did this by randomly changing it to 10 the first time it was called, then incrementing that number to 11 for the next time it was used. a kind of messy way of fixing this, since the actual times were obliterated, but hey, i like ‘em quick and dirty.)

problem solved? problem solved.

except then i realized that certain entries were importing cut off and that most entries were missing their comments.

blah.

the first problem had to do with the trimming of   characters. the script was set to trim those out, but i couldn’t figure out what the problem was, so my solution was to just do a search in dreamweaver for   and replace it with a good old spacebar space. (btw, i think i fucked this up because the last time i imported, i could clearly see words colliding where non-break spaces had been omitted.)

this appeared to fix my problems where entries had been truncated, but the comments were still only partially importing. again, the word “at” was to blame, as each comment was assigned a unique id by the same method as the entries (except for some reason, these timestamps defaulted to 1969…) so i had to use the same method to remove the word “at” before generating a timestamp.

happy times? happy times.

BUT THEN

i noticed that wordpress was importing carriage returns in html as <br /> tags, which wasn’t actually a huge deal, but after all that time spent trying to get this working, i wasn’t about to let a thing like this slide.

i tried to do a find and replace in dreamweaver, but couldn’t figure out how to “find” a carriage return, so i started looking for something in php that would essentially undo wordwrapping. there is apparently, no such thing. but after googling every combination of relevant search terms i could think of, i found a post about how to “find” carriage returns in dreamweaver. apparently all you have to do is click on the line number just to the left of an empty line in code view, and then select “find” from the edit menu, and it will automatically put a carriage return in the find field. replace all, and voila! no more stupid extra line breaks.

and so, five hours later, a reasonably well imported xanga. if there are any more problems to be found, i give up.

i was also so brainfried from work that i used the word ‘and’ instead of ‘an’ in the previous entry. dvg HAD to point it out.

also, this wordpress thing is amazingly easy to use. //k was right about this and i shouldn’t have been such a stubborn movable type user and switched long ago, if only for that amazingly simple ONE php index file it appears to use…

additionally, wordpress makes it insanely easy to import old entries from blogger and movable type, and thus, against my better judgment i’ve imported shit from blogger that’s like, seven years old. a great meaty chunk is missing from when i was using movable type and my hosting company suddenly and unexpectedly went out of business or something, taking my mySQL database tables with it. i may have hard copies of that period somewhere. that was probably my customer service blogger heyday. also, xanga. i didn’t even check to see if i could import shit off of xanga. i should check that out.

ok, i just spent like, half an hour looking into it and this will take some investigation. i just upgraded my damn xanga to premium for one month to hopefully get an archive file out of them.

do you work?

//k wrote me and email asking about commenting on this thing and why the sign in thing disappeared. is this preventing people from commenting? all i was trying to do was figure out how the captcha thing for movable type works (to no avail) and i have no idea what settings do what. i will try and resurrect it.

incidentally, i am so brain-fried from work today that i seriously spelled ‘tried’ ‘chride’ and had to look at it before i understood that something was very, very wrong.

i already think it’s kind of ridiculous that i need to verify with a *genius* that the right arrow key on my brand new keyboard doesn’t work about 25% of the time. isn’t there some lower level technician, someone who is just a *really, really smart person* that can tell that the right arrow key doesn’t work.

but don’t i need an appointment? i ask.

no! you tell me. i can just waltz right in since the keyboard is still within 14 days old!

but apparently i *do* need an appointment. and as i discovered after having done my waltzing-in-with-keyboard, apparently appointments are to be had no less than two days prior.

i’m not so mad at the policy as i am at the misinformation! get your goddamned information right you idiots.

am i the only person that thinks rhythmic gymnastics is awesome? dvg just oh-godded me.

i think this is part of some gay fascination with the ability to throw and catch things.

well, mother fucker, i can’t figure out what’s been going on with the comments function on here. i’ve been trying to get captcha working, which i think was working for like, a couple weeks, and can’t seem to get it going. fuck you movable type. sorry if my rss republished and sent a bunch of duplicate entries.

light posting means that every time i think about putting something in here, it is one of the many things about which you are not supposed to blog. all apologies, and i’m sure that if i see you in real life i’ve thrown some non-bloggable sputum your way. apologies for that as well. i am going to try and move into more benign but still interesting mind clutter for now.