Sorry about the downtime

My DSL connection went down late last night and I couldn’t get things back up and running until about 10 minutes ago.
The good news is that the next-generation site is almost ready. Want to take a look at it? Look here. It’ll move to the main address very soon, maybe this weekend.

New stuff and old stuff

New stuff. Hmm. I think I need to adopt a new stylebook
Old stuff. And, thanks to some SQL heroics by Steve DeLassus, a couple hundred vintage posts from about a six-month span in late 2000 and early 2001 are now online here. I liberated them from my ancient site at editthispage.com (which, I guess, was Silicon Underground version 2.0). This is two generations later. As old entries gain attention I’ll give them categories and proper titles. A lot of the stuff’s obsolete but I’m sure it’ll interest someone. Last I checked, the old site was getting a hundred or two hits per day consistently.

New stuff. And speaking of old site incarnations, once I’ve decided exactly what mods I want to install and use, I’ll flip the switch on the new site, based on the latest version of b2. The most obvious improvement for most readers will be the spiffy new calendar. It’ll also bring in trackbacks and pingbacks for interaction with other blogs. It also makes some changes to make search engines happier.

More changes on the way

I’m playing with b2 0.61, which comes very close to feature parity with Movable Type. The only thing MT has that made me jealous that this newest version of b2 doesn’t is allowing multiple categories per post, which is something. I remember a Ted Williams tribute I wrote after he died that someone told me belongs in “human interest” rather than “baseball”–permitting multiple categories neatly fixes that problem.
But pingbacks and trackbacks are there, so I can interact with other blogs and they can interact with me, which is good.

On another front, I’ve managed to pull down all of my old content from editthispage.com (October 2000-April 2001), which Steve DeLassus and I are trying to massage into a form suitable for importing here. I did it in a very crude fashion–I set my display preferences to display 365 entries on the front page, then I downloaded my page with wget and I manually stripped out the obvious cruft. Very inelegant but it mostly works.

As for the custom b2 code Steve wrote, I’m getting closer to getting it into a form that’s distributable. The PHP calendar he modified for my use is history, replaced with one by Alex King that integrates more nicely with the rest of b2 and follows Mark Pilgrim’s accessibility guidelines nicely.