Jake Savin Posts

Published October 16, 2014 by

I Need Some WordPress Advice

I have a plan for something I want to do with my site, and could use some advice from experienced WordPress people.

I have two legacy sites that I want to merge into my current WordPress site. Content in this site already consists of the imported content from one of these sites, plus posts I’ve made since switching over.

The other site I want to merge in has conflicting post IDs. In order to redirect old URLs to their new homes in WordPress, I need a way to resolve this conflict in a predictable fashion that can be addressed with mod_rewrite (or something comparably simple).

So I decided to apply an offset of 10,000 as I export the content from that site, so:

  • ID 15 becomes ID 10015.
  • ID 1243 becomes ID 11243.

This guarantees that there will be no conflict with any IDs in the current site.

And since the old IDs can be transformed relatively easily with regex into the new ones, I can create some mod_rewrite rules that are conditional on requests coming to the old host name, which redirect from the old URLs to the new ones. (I’ve already tested this, and it appears to work.)

So basically what I want to know is this:

Is there some reason I should not do this?

Am I painting myself into a corner?

Will the jump from ID ~2000 to ID 10001 cause any issues?

Any gotchas (SEO or otherwise) with my next post after the import starting at roughly ID 12000?

Any comments in favor or against are much appreciated! 🙂

Update: @octothorpe replies on Twitter, “@jsavin That should work, although having a lot of mod_rewrite can add serious latency. Also make the redirects 301s.” — I’m doin’ this thang…

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Published October 16, 2014 by

Dave Winer: Someone had to go first

Dave Winer:

As Walter Isaacson points out  innovators need to be both humanitarians and scientists, we have to touch the human spirit, and be masters of the scientific method. In the bootstrap of blogging it was enormously important that I was both a writer and a programmer. We had to learn to write for this new medium, and we had to figure out how the software worked.

I was lucky in 1994 that I was completely free to explore, and that the world was ready to make this leap. So I began a trip, that led to something wonderful , every bit as big as I thought it might be back then.

Read the whole thing.

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Published October 15, 2014 by

WordPress vs. Roll-Your-Own Blog Engine

Alex King posted an interesting rebuttal of Santiago Valdarrama’s missive explaining why he’s building his own blog engine.

Taken together, these posts pretty much sum up the reasons why I went with self-hosted WordPress, rather than try to roll my own solution, or continue to lope along indefinitely with Manila.

A couple of Alex’s points in particular stuck out for me:

Santiago: There’s always a learning curve. Every platform is different, specially when you want to fine tune your layout and deviate from the provided templates.

Alex: This one strikes me as a bit silly. There is a learning curve when building your own system too – especially if you haven’t written your layout/templating system yet.

Then:

Santiago: You’ll never get to experience the satisfaction of engaging in a conversation about how you developed your own platform from scratch.

Alex: … if what you want is engagement then joining a bountiful and vibrant community of developers is a much bigger opportunity than the potential for a conversation with another NIH hacker.

Santiago finished his post with:

It takes a few evenings of work to get it done. It’s that simple.

Honestly I doubt it. Although I’m an experienced web developer, if I were to attempt to roll my own solution from scratch, it would be a huge undertaking, fraught with many potentially fatal problems:

  • First I’d have to choose a programming language and platform, with very little in the way of criteria with which to make the right decision—at least not without doing a lot of research first.
  • I’d need to decide what features I really need and what I could do without.
  • I’d have to write (and debug) the code—probably a lot of code.
  • If I wanted to be able to use a native app to post to my blog, I’d have to implement a well-known API, with a dialect that the app understands. (Mo code, mo problems.)
  • I wouldn’t be able to take advantage of the vast universe of WordPress plugins: I wanted a feature a plugin implemented, I’d have to write it myself. (Mo code, mo problems)
  • And so on…

And after all that, I’d still have to find a way to export the content from my current site, and import it into the new one, which was something was going to have to do anyway. 🙁

Plus, as Alex hints at by pointing out the vibrancy of the WordPress community, I wouldn’t be able to leverage the experience to actually learn WordPress (and some PHP, and some optimization, and some Apache config, and…).

Update: Santiago has a follow-up post:

“I’d never ask someone to do this. Rolling your own engine means a lot of work, and unless you are really on the nerd side (like I am and Brent Simmons is), it will be a waste of your time.”

Update: More dialog on Twitter

Ps. In the end Brent decided to stick with the self-built engine he’s been using for years, and write an iOS app for himself to post to it remotely. Moral of this story: Stick with what you know?

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