In preparation for a big blog change, I’m tweaking this site so that the permalinks aren’t the query string ones but are “fancy” instead.
This means any existing links to individual entries on this site are gonna be broken in about 3 minutes.
I figure there are probably like… 6 in the world anyway.
Last year I spent a fair amount of energy importing my old posts from other blogs into here. It totalled a little over 3000 posts spanning 6 years.
I still see incoming references to old uccu urls. It wouldn’t have been SUCH a nightmare to accomidate that.
The way to do it would’ve been:
- Tag the old posts with the old post id and ‘uccu’
- Add a rewrite rule to the magic whatchamacallit file that would redirect all the /uccu/*html links to a cgi.
- Add a cgi that redirects to a WordPress searche for the post number from the intended url and ‘uccu’.
- Tada!
But I didn’t tag the uccu posts. After seeing what happened when I tagged the old radio userland posts (massive proliferation of tags and an OldRadioBlog tag) I thought differently.
Well that was wrong.
Now I’ve got people who are getting cached google results coming in to this site and landing on the homepage, which is almost certainly the last thing they want.
Yeah. Looks like it’s time to do some site work.
I’ve come to the conclusion that I should just be shooting for an imperfect solution re: importing the radio posts. There are 1300+ of them. And yeah, I thought I was going to go through and fix all the cross-linking. But ya know what? Ain’t never gonna happen.
What I’m doing is ripping them in with two keywords. ‘OldRadioBlog’ and the old post-id. So yes, I understand that means there are going to be 1330 tags with 1 entry each. But this way if I’m ever supremely motivated to go figure out what the hell is going on, I can fix the cross linking.
I’ll be ripping those in later tonight.
UPDATE: *burp* They’re in there. All 1330. well… 1329. There seems to be some double-escaping problems with old post id 727. I’ll just stuff that in here manually.
Now it’s off to the mpwilson.com/uccu/ posts, which is going to be a fair bit harder as I only have those in their html format.
Good christ this stuff is a headache. Perl has this wonderful module that allows you to build simple xmlrpc clients and servers very easily.
It looks at the structure of your request and figures out by the data type how to map it in to xml by playing data type guessing games.
Unless you pass it a date, which it treats as a string.
Now, xmlrpc has an explicit date type. So if you’re using XMLRPC::Lite to call an api method (for instance metaweblog.newPost) and pass it a date in the request structure (say, in the ‘dateCreated’ or ‘date_created_gmt’ fields), what the server gets isn’t the date field, it’s a string field, even though the contents are the same.
How to force it to call the thing a date I have no idea.
Currently I’m looking at rewriting the damn client in python.
But my eyes keep sliding over to my old (but pretty damn robust) c++ xmlrpc libraries. I could use that to generate a request and, if I was feeling lazy, just pipe the thing into curl or wget.
