Night Owl

Last night I was up in the wee hours moving a client over from Movable Type to WordPress. Easy peasy. She has 3477 entries and 8534 comments and 29 categories and I absolutely did not want to break her URLs so that meant writing a custom script and doing some @.htaccess@ fiddling as well. In the past I’ve seen WordPress’s import utility hang on @mt-import.txt@ because of the out of memory issue, forget categories, and fail to move over basenames, so I did this in chunks of 500 with PHP and SQL within the same database. (And I’d like to chime in that converting from PST to GMT is boring. And annoying. And I never want to do it again. Unless I’m hired to do it.) I kept the code; doing a plugin with it would not be a bad idea. In my copious spare time. Right.

To do today… Nine o’clock and I already have a list. Dishes, laundry, send the kids outside to play, another WordPress installation, and more tweaks for this one. Busy, busy, busy!

The Third Commandment

MySQL went onto OS X without much of a hitch using DarwinPorts, as did updated versions of PHP, Perl, and various modules therein. PostgreSQL seems to be working, but something about Movable Type causes it to not be accessible via ObjectDriver–a stub program I wrote in Perl can access the data in a test database via DBD::Pg just fine, but MT chokes on the same username/password/database combination in mt.cfg.

Math::Pari can kiss my grits. Crypt::DSA made me cry. I despair of ever making sense of that mess of hacks, patches, and recompiles.

ImageMagick can take a hike. I gritted my teeth and installed NetPBM instead. Maybe I’ll use the DarwinPorts version of ImageMagick and see if it plays nicely with PHP; other than that, though, I’m sick of it.

I’d hoped to get MT3.01D working in a PostgreSQL environment, but ended up using MySQL for it instead. It’s installed, however, and working nicely.

Having root is overrated.