We've Moved!

Published on: Sat, 5 June 2010

I had been publishing the blog "Direct Threaded Daydreams" on a hosted site under their no-cost plan for just over a year. Earlier this week, I decided to move.

Several months ago, I wrote a very simple mini-blog PHP script so that I could publish book, DVD, and other kinds of reviews to friends via Facebook. It's a very simple engine that just presents each post and provides links to the next and prior posts.

On Monday, 31 May 2010, I downloaded the text of all of my blog entries in one big RSS blob and then proceeded to delete all my posts, save one; a quick goodbye.

With the help of an XSLT script to flatten the RSS out into a different form and an AWK script, I was able to split the RSS content out into single posts. I modified the mini-blog software to accommodate and went live with the revitalized blog earlier this week. Crawlers from Google and Yahoo! have been nosing around the site for the past several days. Links to my content are starting to appear in some of the search engines. It's kind of ironic; after moving, I lost all of my search-engine placement, so when I search for certain things, my old posts on the now non-existent blog show up very high in the ranks even though the same content doesn't even show on the first page of hits on the new blog.

But, Jim, ... Why did you move?

• Reason 1: I guess it stems from the fact that I'm a control-freak. I believe that I can be more expressive with technical content in a blog where I will have absolute control of the markup. Some of my former blog entries had to link to pages on this site so that I could employ JavaScript or the html5 canvas object or something like that. In addition, I can add some niceties that would only have been available via blog plug-ins on other sites since my blogging software is written in PHP. Note the Random Posts section on the right sidebar. I wrote that up this morning with a small section of PHP code.
• Reason 2: I want to be able to publish pretty much anything I want without overthinking it. I believe that some hosts frown on blog posts that are merely link-aggregators to other sites ... but if I want to publish something like that, I need to be able to do so.
• Reason 3: I wanted to get away from the title Direct Threaded Daydreams and place a more personalized branding on the blog. It now carries my name in the title.
• Reason 4: In case you hadn't guessed ... I like to tinker.

This new blog is a real ... "fixer-upper" ...

Indeed. I wanted to get the posts out on the new site as soon as possible so that the various search-engine crawlers could find them. Among things that are still issues at this point in time are:

• IE 7 and 8 don't display the blog properly It seems to be an issue with the float CSS attribute. Most other browsers ( various versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Safari ) seem to display the two columns as I want them. This is going to remain low in priority on the list of things to fix.
• Comments are gone Yep. I haven't decided whether I want to try to recontitute the ones from the old blog.
• There's no place to leave comments! That's something I will add in time.
• Source-code listings are ugly That's actually one of the first things I'd like to try and fix. I know that some people liked the syntax-highlighted source-code listings, but I'm not sure if that's something that I want to try and implement at this time. Right now, there's a lot of botched markup in those listings. I would ask that, where possible, you download the zip archive associated with a particular post for clean copies of the source.
• Links in the posts still refer to the old blog I'm working on changes to the AWK script so that I can transform those to the new links. The ones that are still very broken contain tags or categories in the URL's from the old blog.I think that I have all of these corrected.
• Social networking buttons are gone Those were actually embedded in each post in the old blog software. I will likely add some code to the main template file so that these are generated for each post. That sounds simple enough to do since I used to have to manually invoke an AWK script to handle that for me on the old site.Fixed. Easily done.
• The syndication feeds are broken I intend to have RSS capabilities in the blog at some point. I'm not sure whether I should host the RSS on a separate site or not. I had difficulties tracking my subscribers from the old blog, so I need to do some leg-work on my options before I implement this feature.
• The categories and keywords are gone I will implement this feature in the near future; I just haven't decided how I want to do it.

There's still work to be done.

Direction

For the next several weeks, I expect to be making changes to address the above issues. At the same time, I will be posting new blog entries. I hope that you all hang around while I get this place into shape.

Unless otherwise noted, all code and text entries are Copyright ©2010 by James K. Lawless

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