Elly Williams’ Weblog

So, I have a slight problem getting my site to validate at the moment, which I’d appreciate some help figuring out. It goes something like this:

• Wordpress produces XHTML
• Therefore, this site has a lot of XHTML in it that I can’t control (my php skills are not up to editing anything server-side)
• del.icio.us automatically posts my link entries as HTML (minus the eX)
• Therefore, this site also has a lot of HTML in it that I can’t control
• Some of the XHTML won’t validate as HTML and some of the HTML won;t validate as XHTML
• Therefore, my site doesn’t validate.

So, I guess my problem is

• How much does it matter?
• How much do I care?
• Can I do anything about it either way?

It’s been two and a half years since I last made any significant changes to the look of this place, and seeing as the backend has changed since then and I’ve now switched my domains over, I figured it was time I built something a little more custom.

I’ve kept quite a bit of the branding - the daisy and the shade of orange are the same, but I’ve gone for something much bolder and cleaner - mostly in the look-and-feel but I’ve tidied up ‘under-the-hood’ too.

I also finally got around to adding myself an hCard, which I’ve been meaning to do for at least a year.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure everything’s working the way it should, but if not shout out in the comments.

Just in the process of moving things over to the new domain. If anything’s hinky, please shout out in the comments!

Along with some 500+ other sites, this site is Pink for October in aid of Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

I lost my Grandma to Cancer when I was about 10. (not Breast Cancer, possibly Endomitrial, I’m not too sure) She’d had it before and had treatment, but it came back. As you can probably tell, I’m fairly fuzzy on the details.

Anyway, this is a worthy cause, and I’m doing my bit. Have a look at the links below and see if you can do anything too.

• Breast Cancer Campaign - Charity specialising in funding Breast Cancer Research
• Cancer Research UK - The UK’s leading Cancer Research Charity
• Breast Cancer Care - Breast Cancer Support and Information
• Cancer Backup - Information, practical advice and support for cancer patients, their families and carers

After 4 months without checking, I have 8632 unread posts in my feedreader. Eeek!!!

It’s been a bit quiet here recently (apart from the spammers). This is because in the midst of leaving my job, moving 300miles north, buying a flat and adopting a dog, I have been pretty much entirely without internet since the end of June. It may be a while before I’m properly connected up again, but I just thought I should say that I’m ok, and that Newcastle is treating me very well.

Anyway…

This article on the unfathomability of various web-terms, by the british public(via Simon) got me thinking back to a conversation I had with a colleague about six months ago. He asked “What’s the difference between a chatroom and a blog?”. I can’t remember exactly what I said, but I’m fairly sure I gave a thoroughly unsatisfactory answer.

Let’s try the question another way.. In terms that you would use to a taxi driver, landlord or hairdresser…

A chatroom is a to a blog, what a [—] is to a [—]

debate is to a lecture?

conference call is to a letter?

free-for-all is to a committee?

After writing my own Fixed Width Article last week, I decided it was time for a change. If people are building fixed width layouts because it’s ‘the done thing’ then surely having a fixed width layout puts me in the ‘part of the problem’ camp, rather than the ‘part of the solution’ camp.

So, yes, I now have a liquid layout. What used to be a single image in the header is now a three part sliding door, and I can now be much more liberal with the length of my post titles.

And anyway, it’s been quite fun to do. And I fully intend to do lots more exciting things with sliding doors having only discovered what they’re called at SXSW - despite the fact I’d been using them since January

While having a quick look at my stats (because I haven’t in a while) I noticed this….

Firefox is fast catching up as the browser-of-choice people are using to view my site. And if you add up Firefox, Mozilla, Opera and Safari, then the total is higher than IE.

Which is nice

I finally got annoyed with Wordpress storing all my spam, so I went and deleted it all manually. I don’t think I’m going to use “Mark as Spam” any more. It confuses my “Recent Comments” counter into thinking there are more comments than there are.

You might have noticed my site died a bit today. If not, you missed a rather persistent parse error message. Basically, I’ve been trying to ‘adapt’ the blogroll plugin I use (which pulls in stuff from blo.gs) to pull in my xfn data as well, as I couldn’t find a plugin anywhere which displayed how I wanted it to.

The last time I coded anything without someone sat next to me was when I was about 8. And that was in Basic. I don’t know php. So, naturally a few things went wrong, and something went so wrong I couldn’t fix it until about an hour ago because it wouldn’t let me log into Wordpress.

But it all works now, and I’m xfn’ed and generally quite pleased with myself.

About 20hours after leaving Austin at 1pm yesterday, we finally got home. Given tiredness and jetlag and general annoyance at the British public, weather and transport systems, I had planned to upgrade to Wordpress 1.5 this afternoon, and then spend some time playing with it and possibly getting around to writing about SXSW (maybe).

Except that some combination of :

• My Computer
• My Internet Connection (it’s so good to have broadband back!!)
• My FTP Client
• My Site Hosting
• The Intarweb as a whole
• The Leprachauns who are still annoyed at me for not wearing green on St Patrick’s Day

have decided that uploading and downloading are both out for the moment.

So instead I’m going to read my copy of The ZEN of CSS Design which came in the post while I was away.

One unexpected site effect of the move is that I don’t ping external stuff in quite the same way anymore. Whereas previously I used to ping as http://www.ellythompson.co.uk/blog/ I now ping as http://www.ellythompson.co.uk/blog …. aparaently these are different enough to warrant me two entries on blo.gs (thanks to Dave for helping me figure this out)

I’m pinging manually as http://www.ellythompson.co.uk/blog/ for the moment, but probably won’t keep it up.

Edit: Actually, the lovely people at blo.gs appear to have combined the two now so you can subscribe to whichever you like. Hooray!!

As promised, “Elly’s Guide to Moving from Movable Type to Wordpress”. Although it’s probably more of a guide to how not to do it ;).

Part of the reason I feel the need to write this, rather than just listing the sources I used, is that it actually took me two goes to get this to work. Also, I’ve offered to sort Meri’s Site in the next week or so and could do with a record.

On my first attempt I was trying to get a version of my site working in WordPress separate from my MT site, and then switch the two at the last minute. I installed Wordpress, Imported my MT entries, replaced the wP stylesheet with my own and changed the WP index template so the two played nicely together. So far so good. At this point I decided to publish my new site in in the same directory as my old one, at the same time as setting up MT permalink redirects. This is where it starts to go wrong. MT’s rebuilds every time I get a comment. This is quite often (comment spam is one of the reason’s I’m moving, after all) and means I keep getting confused as to which version of my site I’m looking at. The permalink redirection method I’m using doesn’t actually redirect to the WP default location, so I have to mess around with permalinks. Also, moving the publish directory in Wordpress isn’t anywhere near as easy as I expected it be. Anyway, it’s not long before I get to the point where no only does very little work, but I can’t remember what I did to get it that way. At this point I throw a bit of a tantrum and go and make Syrup Sponge.

Post gluttony, I decide to start over. I download everything that I publish on my site. I reinstall Wordpress, and upload the desired index.php and css file. I make sure I’ve got all my settings the way I want them and I import my old MT entries. Finally I set up permalink redirects, using a method based on the one I linked to before (I’ll write it up later, honest). This means that I now have a fully functioning site, in place of my old one, and it only took me a couple of hours (minus tweaking, which I’m still doing)

So, for anyone who’s interested (and also for external memory’s sake)… Elly’s guide to the MT-WP Switch

1. Get Wordpress
2. Install it locally, or somewhere you don’t care about it
3. Make whatever modifications to the Index Template and Stylesheet you want
4. Make sure you have a local copy of everything you want to keep or use
5. Uninstall MT & clear your blog directory (or just move it, how lucky are you feeling?)
6. Install Wordpress in your blog directory (you may have to clear a database or two first)
7. Upload the index.php and wp-layout.css files you prepared earlier - along with any other bits and pieces you need for them to work
8. Import your MT entries
9. Set up Permalink Redirects
10. Tweak to your heart’s content

I am now running wordpress. And I like it. Wordpress generally feels a lot less clumpy than MT did, and once I figured out what I was doing, it was suprisingly easy to set up. I’ll write a proper “Elly Guide to Moving to Wordpress” at some point, when I’ve actually figured out what I did.

In other news, Meri and I are planning to attend SXSW in March. Should be fun