After almost 2 months without a post, apakuni.com is now back online! Did you miss me?

During the first week of May, Xaraya lost it’s server in a hard drive crash. Almost everything was lost, and stupid me did not keep a regular back up of the MySQL database that drove my site. Luckily, Moveable Type (MT) produces static HTML and I had just backed up the static site in preperation for a move to a new server.

So, I found a really cool PERL script that parses MT’s static HTML and creates an MT import script. With a little help from FXN over at irc.freenode.net#perl, I modified this script to grab even more data from the static archive than the original script. After some trial and error and a lot of clean up in the MT import file, I recovered everything but my trackbacks. Woohoo! At some point, I will post a step-by-step tutorial of this process. Others may find it useful.

At this point, I had to make a decision. Stay with MT or jump over to WordPress (WP)? Unlike some, I was not terribly offended by the decision of SixApart (MT developer) to adopt a new licensing scheme designed to generate cash. After all, MT is how Ben and Mena Trott make their living, so more power to them. However, WordPress was very attractive because it is written in PHP, a language I already know well which makes it simpler for me to customize in the code if I like. In the end, WordPress won the day, but not over the licensing hubub.

So, this site is now run by WordPress 1.2 and it is chock full of hacks, both big and small. By the way, I am still tweaking some old entries, reworking the categories schema, fixing the perma link scema so old MT trackbacks will work and generally cleaning things up from the move. So, if you find something that is broken, please let me know by posing a comment to that particular entry.

At some point in the future, I may do a feature-by-feature comparison of MT vs. WP. For now, I am happy with the switch. The only quibble I have is that WP does not provide an option for static publishing. This was one feature of MT that I loved. Obviously, it saved my bacon when the site died recently and static publishing seems to really make pages load quicker. Oh well, perhaps I have new project!

Finally, I took the time to reskin the site finally. The new “aquarium” skin is not radically different from the old “koi” skin in terms of layout. Obviously, the images and color scheme have changed considerably. The photos were taken at the Newport Aquarium during a recent trip back home to Cincinnati.

Now that I’ve moved to a new server and got everything converted to WP, I’ll be blogging regularly again.

Peace.