Since the server crash, I’ve been working hard at putting my weblog back together. I’ve been trying to learn how the WordPress publishing system works, and later on I’ll work at customizing it. So for now, you’re stuck with the default look that comes with WordPress. It’s not bad, actually, but this site doesn’t feel like it’s mine because I haven’t customized it yet. Remember, I built the last incarnation of The Mad Philosopher by hand. I received a great idea from the ether for a new logo, so I’ll eventually design it and then choose my colour scheme and integrate it with the site. But for now, I’m still working on the content.
It turns out that the backup I recently made of the old site got erased because Bruce forgot it was there. I got very mad and couldn’t sleep well last night because of that, but I’ve let it go now. I’ve managed to find most of the missing files in various places on my computer. All of the blog entries were safely stored on Blogger, so it’s only the graphics and sound clips that I’ve had to dig up from various places. Most files I’ve been able to restore from a backup that I do have from way back in August 2004.
WordPress comes with a script that will import your blog entries from Blogger. It worked pretty well. Because I’m the careful guy that I am, I generated a list of my Blogger entries by title and timestamp and compared it to what got imported into this new system. I’m glad that I did because I found that two months got missed in the transfer. I was able to redo the transfer for just those two months. The entries from a year and a half at the beginning of the blog didn’t have titles, so I retroactively gave them each titles. While doing this, I read through what was imported and found that a couple of entries were truncated, so I’ve fixed that. I’ve also categorized half of the old entries and half of the new ones. There’s just a batch in between that I’ve yet to do. But it’s pretty cool to be able to browse my blog by category. See the sidebar on the right of the main page.
Once the blog is taken care of, I can add some pages of my old content, and fill this site out into a real website. Wish me luck. And thanks for reading and staying with me through the turmoil. Especially those of you on RSS. I probably broke your aggregators more than a few times!