Betalogue

Since I moved from my Radio UserLand blog system to pMachine back in July 2003, I have had a backlog of things that need to be done to clean up the entire blog archive. Here’s a short update.

At this point, all my Radio blog entries have been added to the pMachine database. This means that they are all now part of the new (pMachine-powered) blog, which is what you are reading right now.

What has not been moved to the new database so far, are the comments that Betalogue readers posted when my blog was powered by Radio. Unfortunately, Radio handles blog comments using UserLand’s own servers, which makes the process of retrieving these comments and adding them to the current database rather problematic — especially since posting comments requires some form of registration with some personal information, and I’d have to do this on behalf of those readers who posted their comments back then in the Radio-powered blog. It raises issues that I am not sure I want to have to deal with. (For example, people who registered to post a comment on my Radio-powered blog registered with UserLand’s servers. Can I register them myself in my pMachine-power blogging system, without consulting with them first?)

I haven’t made a final decision on this, but unfortunately it’s looking more and more like those old comments will never be added to the current blog, even though the corresponding entries on which these comments are commenting are now part of the new blog and have their own comments architecture.

The other issue raised by the change in blogging systems is, of course, entry links. When writing a new blog entry, I regularly refer to older posts in my blog by linking to them. I did that when I was using Radio too — but the links refer to the old Radio posts. The posts containing these links have now been transferred to the new blog, but their links have not been updated. In other words, you might be reading a blog entry in Betalogue with the new (current) look, and then click on a link in that entry that takes you to another blog entry that uses the old Radio look.

I am in the process of fixing such links, but it’s going to take me time, because it can only be done manually: there is no systematic correspondence between blog item links in Radio and blog item links in pMachine. I have to locate each blog entry that has such an old link, identify the item referred to by the link, find the corresponding item in the new blog, and update the link. Rather tedious.

Once this is done, however, the old Radio pages will become pretty much irrelevant and you will only see them if you are referred to them by a search engine such as Google.

Thanks for your patience.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Tuesday, November 25th, 2003 at 2:21 am and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.