Wow! What an adventure this migration has been. I would not have had a snowball’s chance of moving Funny to BlueHost by myself. It’s been quite a challenge for Mrs. Micah, who’s an expert. Apparently the issue is that quite a lot of strange code lurks in the innards of Funny about Money, with many squirrelly results. Mr. Micah, himself a university-trained technoguru, was called in on the job, and together they’ve been wrestling with this thing for many more hours than any of us bargained on.
Funny was born on iWeb, Apple’s allegedly idiot-proof blogging platform. It’s easy to use, but also pretty limited in scope; after the MobileMe fiasco, I decided to move FaM to WordPress, which can be accessed from any platform and from any computer that’s online.
Natch, WordPress will not import from iWeb. This meant I had to copy each post and page out of iWeb, store it in Word, and then import it into WordPress. One. at. a. time.
WordPress doesn’t like Word, which as you know is awash in squirrelly code. So instead of pasting directly into a WordPress post, you have to run the copy through a kind of “scrubber,” conveniently provided on the toolbar. I thought I’d done this for each and every entry.
However, it was a mind-numbingly tedious chore, which I performed at night while parked in front of the television, itself a mind-numbing state. So it’s entirely possible that an article or two accidentally got slapped directly from Word into a post. We’re told this can create all sorts of havoc. But at WordPress.com, things seemed to work smoothly enough.
The Micahs theorize that the Wordscrubber sometimes fails to remove all the offending code. That also could be an explanation. Or it may be that something came through from iWeb (which creates an impenetrable barrier between user and code for all but the most MacTechie).
Whatever the cause, I’m beginning to wonder if the thing is corrupting as it goes. An hour ago Mrs. M celebrated success. When I looked at it, most of the site seemed OK, but then on second and third glance more and more posts proved to be truncated…at least one or two of which I’d swear were just fine the first time I saw them.
There’s a Feedburner feed. I have yet to figure out how to make it readily available to you, but you can click on that link. At the moment the posts are out of order, but with any luck we’ll get that straightened out, too. And there’s you can sign up for an e-mail feed, which I haven’t experimented with yet.
Mrs. Micah has staggered out of the wrestling ring. I also need to give up for the nonce: spent the better part of a week writing a proposal to save our office at the Great Desert University, bandying ideas back and forth with half a dozen colleagues. Finally sent it off to Her Deanship this afternoon. She hasn’t even bothered to respond… Experience suggests that the Wells of Silence effect is never good. Not that I seriously expected it would fly, anyway.
So, with everybody too exhausted to move, à demain.