Shattered Crystalline Matrix

For some reason that I cannot fathom, I am currently #9 on a Google search for capitalist pigs, and #7 for “capitalist pigs”. I first noticed this a couple of weeks back, but I now find that Google searches for capitalist pigs are the leading source of visits to this blog. WTF? I’m guessing that someone googlebombed me using another URL that redirects to my website; anyone have any ideas how to track this down? I honestly don’t really care about it, except now I’m so damned curious that I’m about to die of curiosity.

This isn’t meant to last,
this is for right now.
— Nine Inch Nails, Last

Spent several hours this morning importing my old old blog posts into WordPress; the import is now complete. Early on in the life of the blog, I began generating an Atom feed directly from my hand-written XHTML; later on, I changed my markup to use the hAtom microformat, and ditched my custom transform in favour of hAtom2Atom. I used this again to run a conversion over each month’s posts, although I had to edit the oldest into hAtom form since they were using a custom class schema; just a trivial matter of assigning the correct classes. I then had to remove the doctype declaration from each page, because Saxon was failing to fetch the XHTMTL 1.1 DTD for some reason; since the DTD was completely unnecessary for this transform, I decided it would be easier to just ditch it.

Now that I had the ability to generate an Atom feed for each page, the next trick was importing this into WordPress somehow. WordPress supports importing an RSS 2.0 feed, so I tracked down another transform to convert the Atom to RSS 2.0: atom2rss-exslt.xsl. After hacking it slightly to run on Saxon 6 (the decode-uri function detection doesn’t work, since it checks for a later version of the Saxon processor), I had what looked like good RSS 2.0 output, which I imported. Unfortunately, this didn’t work out so well; the tags weren’t imported, and WordPress inserts a <br> tag for each newline; since the output of the transform had a bunch of extraneous newlines, this meant that my posts were now littered with extraneous line breaks. I edited the transform to get rid of the newlines, but still wasn’t very happy with this.

So… plan B! WordPress has an import/export format called WordPress eXtended RSS; basically, RSS 2.0 plus a whole whack of custom WordPress extension elements. I spent around an hour hacking the transform to generate WXR output. This was even more painful than it sounds; for example, encoded content is “supported” by stripping any CDATA section start/end markers, and then importing the content as-is. Even if there wasn’t a CDATA section. I guess they only care about reading their own output.

As a final touch, I hacked the transform a little more to insert an invisible anchor tag at the beginning of each post so that even my old permalinks will work. This was fortunately quite easy to do, since my old URL scheme was year/month, which happens to be supported by WordPress too; I just needed the anchors so that you would get taken to the correct post.

Hope lies in the rubble of the rich fortress,
taking today what tomorrow never brings.

This is the new sound,
just like the old sound,
just like the noose wound,
over the new ground.

— Rage Against The Machine, Ashes in the Fall

NOTE: If you are reading this, you are on my new / current blog. Congratulations!

So, uh, I have a new blog. Again. Yes, I know.

Apparently it’s just under two years since the last time I did this. Really? It seems like it should have been a lot longer than that. Oh well. Like that move, this one sucks in some ways; for one, there’s no way to redirect my Vox blog to anything except another Vox blog. Also, I’ve been primarily linking to my Vox blog for the last year or two, and so there are a lot of hyperlinks scattered around that I’ll have to try to change. Ugh.

It’s not all bad, though. I was able to import all of the content from my Vox blog. I’m also back on my own domain (and here to stay, I would imagine), and I’m even back at the same URL as my pre-Vox blog (the one with handwritten XHTML). I haven’t yet imported the content from my pre-Vox blog, but that shouldn’t be too hard. I also have much more control over the blog; while I’m unlikely to be touching PHP code any time soon, WordPress + plugins is fairly configurable and manipulable on its own. I also plan to edit the theme templates so the output is marked up with hAtom, but that should be pretty easy too.

If you’re wondering what’s up with this blog, it’s running on a Linode I deployed just for this purpose. WordPress is running on PHP-FPM behind nginx, using a MySQL database; the whole thing didn’t take all that long to setup (although I had some help), and since there’s nothing else running on the VM, I don’t have to worry too much if it goes insane and consumes all available resources or something.

I’m running a number of plugins:

• Akismet: spam filtering is mandatory, of course.
• Atom Default Feed: because RSS is bloody awful.
• nginx Compatibility (PHP5): for better operation behind nginx.
• RPX: this is what allows you to log in with Facebook, OpenID, etc. when you leave a comment.

Anyhow, so there you have it. Don’t forget to update your subscriptions; although, since my new feed is at the same location as my pre-Vox feed, some of you might not need to. If you’re looking for my old blog’s content, then sorry; it’s currently unavailable. I do intend to import the content, as well as get the old URLs working again, but I decided to rather get this online right away than wait until I sorted out all the details.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that thanks needs to go to Pierre Nel; without his invaluable assistance, this whole process would have been far more painful