Blog changes….
As you may have noticed, if you have been here before, the blog has changed!
Originally the blog was hosted over at mac.com but was moved to this location in February 2005. The move came about due to some hosting problems over at mac.com and because it was thought it was better to have the blog at the same site as the MMISoftware website.
The blog was written using iBlog. The program works ‘as described on the tin’, however, it was always a bit limiting in the html that could be created and in the design of the eventual blog.
After some looking around it was decided to use wordpress and ecto.
wordpress is a php and MySQL system. This fits in well with current, and future, work at MMISoftware. Installation of wordpress was snap. Never had an easier install. Took less that 5 minutes (php and MySQL were already up and running).
All blog entries can be created and edited in wordpress. However, this is like a little step back in time as all the entries have to be hand-coded in html. An alternative solution is to use ecto which has a WYSIWYG editor and also has the advantage that entries can be created and edited whilst offline.
One problem was how to get the entries out of iBlog. The solution turned out to be Agitprop. This program, which is freeware, did a pretty good job.
- Follow the instructions with Agitprop and extract the entries from iBlog.
- Move the resulting entry file and image file over to the webserver (used Interarchy for the transfer – a great program from Stairways)
- Follow the instructions with wordpress to load the entries.
- Use ecto to clean up any transfers that didn’t quite work.
In fact a number of the entries needed a bit of work as my attempts to get around the html limitations in iBlog had caused some problems with the processing by Agitprop. The entries were cleaned up using BBEdit and Applescript.
There is also a new RSS feed which is at http://www.mmisoftware.co.uk/weblog/wp-rss2.php
