20 November 2005, 00:41 by mark hoekstra

old skool weekend & site updates

This morning I thought “oh, let’s update textpattern!”, of which my server ran version 1.0rc3 but it seems they’re already at 4.0.2 now… It should’ve gone easy, but of course, it didn’t… I used messy url-ing (like index.php?id=264) on this site, because I had some trouble with the dynamic text replacement script, combined with clean url-ing (like /blog/322)... but… on this all-improved textpattern (and it really is a major improvement), it seems site-sections (like /about) don’t work when you don’t have clean-url-ing… So I configured it to use clean url-ing and had to dig deep to find the reason why my dynamic text replacement wouldn’t work… It seemed it all had to do with a test-image which is sent to the browser to check if your browser does understand images at all, if the answer is yes, it sends you the rendered headers above each post… Now, in the script, the location of the test-image (test.png) was relative instead of absolute and so the whole dynamic text replacement was broken when you tried to load a clean url…

Anyways… having that fixed, I also noticed there’s a nice import-funtion in textpattern, which led me to configure my server to (for once and for all) run my old content-management-system (which is movable type btw) so I would be able to fix some errors in old posts and export everything out of it… but then it seemed I had everything backed up except the old database (which for security-reasons was nowhere in the web-accessible directories of course)

...which led me to fire up my old webserver (also for once and for all) to get access to my old database there…

I managed to get all the data into MovableType on my current server, changed some url’s in the old posts, exported it, imported it into textpattern and guess what?

This site now has an archive!!! yay!

...and that includes some very old posts from the very beginning of this site… everything is also searchable from the search-box on the right :-)

So, digging through old posts and with my Classic II already on the kitchentable, connected through a serial cable to my Sun Ultra 1 in my closet and my Challenge S on a chair… this must be old-skool-weekend…

next to the archive, there are lots and lots of smaller changes I made to the site… there are still some flaws but for now it’s good to go …euhm, I guess… ;-)

OH! and if this site all of a sudden acts freaky(I see some strange requests in my logs)... try emptying your cache, I had to change quite a bit to quite some files today…

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As mentioned in the Message from Mark's family this site has been made static. This means that it will be no longer possible to comment on his ideas and projects, but that we all can continue to cherish his creativity.

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