Site Navigation:
Craig's twitter feed:
Getting my blog back up to speed has been on my to-do list for more than 3 years. As of tonight, it's done. All my blog entries from March of 2005 through the present are all here in one blog. The photos work, links work. Long live the blog, etc.
I started out using the blogger platform in 2005. It was (may still be) a great platform. I'd already established my own web site at craigsteffen.net, so I quickly figured out how to get blogger to generate entries and export them via auto-magic ftp to my own site. That arrangement worked fine until...I think it was late 2008.
I think it was that year that blogger announced that they were going to discontinue the external-ftp service. So I decided to set up a different blogging software. I looked over some of the packages available, and I decided that pivot was what I wanted to use. It stored its files as flat files on disk, but could be configured with menus and stuff.
I was able to pull most of my old blogger entries into pivot, sort of, but the images never quite worked right. And I discovered that I couldn't make pivot do categories of posts, which is one of the things that I really wanted to work. So after a short time, I decided that it would be easier to just write my own software rather than trying to get someone else's to do what I wanted.
So I've been working on a set of php and perl scripts in my free time for the past couple of years. The blog that you see here is the result. Up until the past few days, the last time I spent serious time working on it was a year and a half ago, the summer 2011. Starting in August of 2011, I've been working on a different bigger project, mentally I've been busier and had less left-over concentration to work on my blog scripts.
However, I've been working on it a lot in the past four days here at my parent-in-law's for the holidays. Thursday and Friday I posted 8 entries that I'd been meaning to put together for the past few weeks. Yesterday and today I've been working on hammering out the script that converted the original export file that blogger created for me in 2008. Today I finally ran that and it was able to pull all the 450-odd entries that I'd had in the old blogger blog. This evening, while watchin football, I ran the script that converted the pivot entries, and also the one that converted the blogger entries. The embedded photos were located in different directories, so I had to carefully combine the two sets of entries to get everythin to work right.
So there might be a few nits here or there, but as of now, I have all the entries from all three major phases my blog has gone through, all working and indexed using the main interface, the one I wrote. It's a bit clunky, but it works. There are the originall bloggger entries, the pivot entries, and the current flat file blog entries.
Happy Holidays, everyone! And happy blogging. :-D