I Has Returned
October 11th, 2008I Can Only Guess at Your Joy
Welcome to the new Hog on Ice. I know it’s pretty spare, but I like it. It’s a new start. MT is great if you’re a code genius with no life, and it handles photos much better than WordPress, but other than that, WordPress is king, in my questionable opinion.
I hate to toss all the great free work Phin and Sadie did for me, but there was no way to move it to WP. Phin says he may have a nice three-column theme lying around, so I can make my site look a little better. As you can tell, I created this site using the same theme I used for my other WP blogs. I made a new theme, but the php was straight from Mars, and I couldn’t figure out how to insert images in it.
I imported six months of old entries. It’s incredibly hard to import big blogs to WP, and Hog on Ice is extremely big, because I cannot shut up. I don’t know if I’ll import the old stuff wholesale or not. I’m thinking I should go through it item by item and only republish stuff people are likely to care to see again. I’ll bet my traffic plummets now; the links to the old crap won’t work any more.
I managed to save my blogroll, so at least I don’t have to sweat about that.
Haloscan comments are history, for the time being. I’ll see how well WP and Akismet work. If I have no problems, I’ll continue using WP’s commenting system.
To get back to the kind of BS I usually write about, let me inform you that I tried a McGriddle today. I had no idea what to expect. I can’t be bothered to read the little descriptions on the drive-thru thing.
It turns out a McGriddle is an Egg McMuffin with Sausage, made with small thick pancakes instead of muffins. And they have somehow injected maple syrup flavor in there.
I don’t think they’re for me. It’s just a little too weird. And the syrup conflicts with ketchup. Still, it beats the daylights out of the scary breakfast deals they serve at Wendy’s.
October 11th, 2008 at 7:09 PM
I just gave my blog a new look as well. Of course, I am less than a month into this blogging thing so I didn’t have as much invested as you, should I have screwed it up.
I haven’t had any dealings with WP or MT, but can tell you that Blogger templates are a snap. I had a site in the nineties, before they were called blogs, that I maintained with good ‘ole notepad and an ftp client. It had alot of dynamic content which was achieved through mile long database queries. Now all I have to do is add a widget to get the same results. Life is good.
I don’t care for McGiddles either. I’ll choose the sausage, egg, and cheese McMuffin every time.
October 11th, 2008 at 7:11 PM
Blue?!!
October 11th, 2008 at 7:17 PM
Welcome back! It’s like you never left.
October 11th, 2008 at 8:21 PM
I like the looks of the new version. It went fairly quickly – I hope it was minimal hassle to do.
October 11th, 2008 at 9:03 PM
I hope I can still dig through “Death by fork” going way back. I got hooked in China when I was bored and Lucienne recommended your site. Teached them Chinese some good cooking, they are all about fat and have some great stuff that would slay the South.
October 11th, 2008 at 9:18 PM
For a minute there I was terrified by the thought that you’d been totally subsumed into the Walken Borg.
October 11th, 2008 at 9:19 PM
…umm, I can see you’re still struggling with that Home page button concept though. Heh.
October 11th, 2008 at 9:27 PM
WP rocks. I used to be an MT user too, but my last Movable Type blog just stopped working one day, and I didn’t feel like figuring out why. WordPress is easier to deal with in many ways. Also it loads faster.
October 11th, 2008 at 10:58 PM
WordPress is OK. I especially like it where the developers every few weeks add cool new buggy marginal features and then nag you to upgrade. They are super smart, though, almost like Obama. Or maybe the MT people are Obama and WP is McCain. At least with software you aren’t hostage to the preferences of the other 51% of bloggers.
Here is some unsolicited advice:
-The way to import your MT archives is one month at a time. IOW, make a series of one-month MT archives rather than one big archive to be imported into WP. (Google for more info.) After you are done importing, if you find any errors in the imported posts, run the import process for the affected month again until the errors go away.
-Andreas09 (I think it’s called) is a pretty good three-column theme that’s easy to modify.
-Consider Spam Karma 2 as an alternative to Akismet. I find SK2 to be superior (easy to tune to minimize false positives/negatives). The developer no longer supports it but you shouldn’t need support.
October 12th, 2008 at 12:07 AM
I like the new look!
October 12th, 2008 at 12:39 AM
Oh yeah! you have returned. Nice look, I like it.
Thank you so much for the comments on Mishy’s blog.
Everything you say about yourself, all those nice things are true!
I already suspected it.
October 12th, 2008 at 1:59 AM
Doesn’t this color scheme cause epileptic seizures in young Japanese gamers?
October 12th, 2008 at 2:17 AM
It is easy to switch themes in WP. After my fall holidays, circa 10/23, I’ll help. Before then, I’ll email you some links to some excellent theme repositories where you can shop for one you find aesthetically pleasing.
October 12th, 2008 at 3:56 AM
In all this screwing around with your site, just don’t ever lose that cartoon of the pink thing on skates with the duck and the chicken with its head on fire.
October 13th, 2008 at 1:58 AM
I want to know how you guessed my joy!
October 13th, 2008 at 3:28 AM
Just be sure to check any free themes for the evil crap that some theme “designers” like to insert. Let me know if you need help checking for that.
October 13th, 2008 at 4:28 PM
Thanks, but can’t you just email Phin and tell him “no evil crap?”
October 13th, 2008 at 6:43 PM
Congrats Steve. I moved away from MT back in … ’05 maybe? Don’t miss it at all.
No blogging platform or ‘content management system’ is perfect for everybody, so if you find one that doesn’t annoy too much, that’s a victory.