Archive for December, 2008

Snow has arrived in the Puget Sound area and clinched us in its vice-like death grip, crushing our collective ‘nad pouch with its icy doomsqueeze like the pathetic little virginal winter worms that we are. Apparently all 24 Seattle snowplows have been hard at work. Unfortunately none of them are dedicated to the road in front of our house which takes a snow ‘n’ ice shellacking every year due to the tall trees, and becomes impassible due to its length and steepness. The wonderment of wintertime in an unprepared region made for hilarious hi-jinks yesterday as no less than four vehicles were abandoned on our road - the drivers all looking downcast as they reluctantly shlepped themselves off to… somewhere – while smart-ass kids whizzed past them on sleds. Good times.

I’ve got a new gadget for you to mess around with. When converting them to WordPress, all the old posts lost their attached images. Obviously this sucks. So I made a little photo gallery thingie for browsing the entire archived library of Pimpstyle pictures – the good, the bad, and the ugly. They will be without their original context, and you can currently only browse one at a time, but it’s still kind of sweet. There are some hidden gems in there too. Check it out!

What’s up, peepazoids? Maybe I just coined that term, maybe not. About this migration. I spent my Sunday evening pulling the bulk of the data from the old PS to the new. All in all, the results were mixed. WordPress just does not have a way to import comments from a non-blog like the PS. Furthermore, the old PS ran on Microsoft SQL, and the new incarnation runs on the open source MySQL. These two databases don’t exactly play nice together, so my direct-data manipulation options were limited as well. In the end I was forced to exercise some commando tactics to get this thing done.

What we have now is about 98% of the old content, represented in some funky ways. Since WordPress wants every post to have a title, and none of our old posts besides the first in a thread technically had a title, I was faced with a decision: come up with a unique title for every imported post, or cut my losses and start fresh with no old content. Not liking the idea of cutting loose, I opted for the prior and came up with a naming convention, albeit an awkward one. You’ve probably already noticed some of these. The format is this: Username + (old post unique ID) + Re: + old thread title. Pretty ugly, but if nothing else, it at least communicates some context from the thread of origin. They should also be decently searchable if you want to look up old stuff. Ideally I would have imported the first post of every thread as the “Post,” and all the subsequent posts as “Comments.”  But as I said, WordPress just doesn’t have a means of importing items as comments, unless they existed as such in a blog in the first place. Very lame. Going forward, though, all replies to a post will occur in the comments where they belong – true to the Web 2.0 paradigm we by now are all used to.

This may give rise to a question – one that has been rolling around in my skull for the past couple years: isn’t the Pimpstyle 2000 a message board and not a blog? First let me say this: your mom is a blog. I blogged her last night. Then I posted all up in her comments. Next I’ll answer the question: the PS was indeed a message board. But it was also a technology experiment for myself as I tinkered with various web page designs and html widgets, database shenanigans and other what-have-you. To that end, this latest evolution is no different. I have a lot of learning to do with open source web doohickery, and once again the PS serves as the sandbox for experimentation. For now the PS is something between a forum and a blog. But just know that it is and always will be an Advanced Messaging System.

But it’s also a place where some cool people get together sometimes for some at-work chatting, cute puppy picture posting, Starbucks line-standing ranting, and noob pwning. So I definitely want to keep it real, and stay true to myself. You gotta be true to yourself, right? So my goal now is to figure out a new user-friendly design and keep this mutha rolling. There are at least 5 of us here that use this damn thing, and I’m gonna stay true to each of you as well. And to your moms.

PS – If you haven’t clicked the link in the e-mail you (should have) received and logged into the site, do so now! Once you’re logged you can change the password you were issued in the mail to something more memorable. Then the site should remember you and you can post new posts, leave comments, etc. without having to type your name and e-mail every time.

Serious Business

Hello, peeps. I have finally decided it’s time for the PS to move to a proper content management system. After six years of running on my own homebrew code, it’s clear that the PS is not aging well. This was underscored today when I got a text from Ragan asking WTF he couldn’t post via his new LG touchscreen phone. The answer was that I had just not really accounted for such sweet action.

And the fact is, newer, more robust tools have surfaced and it’s time to get with the 2009 freshness. I don’t have as much time these days to fix stuff when it breaks, so… enter: WordPress. WordPress is the prevailing blogging software right now. But it has also emerged as a powerful content management platform (as we say in the biz).  I’m actually doing a large project at work that requires some mastery of this stuff, so the PS is going to be my guinea pig as I attempt to ramp up my knowledge. (I know, I know: you ramped up MY MOM last night.)

So for the next little while, prepare to be confused by the goings-on on the PS. It’s going to look like a blog for a while, but will hopefully shape up into something more satisfactory as I continue to migrate all the old content. As always, thanks for tuning in!