Journal de Jacques

I’m going to make a second attempt to migrate Troppo to the new server this weekend.

I have two alternative strategies to look at. One involves chopping bits out of Wordpress that prevent the export/import system from working in the way I want them to.

The other involves a few hours of tedious SQL munging.

You may see Troppo go offline on Saturday or Sunday.

There will be transient locking of comments, so please hold off on the conspiracy theories about moderation policies for the duration.

Today (Saturday) I will be moving Troppo to a new server. During the day you will see intermittent connectivity. Once we’ve moved across I’ll update this announcement.

Update: Ahem. The move will take longer than anticipated — it will probably happen Sunday instead.

Update 2: To prevent people being from being upset by their bon mots going missing, I’ve temporarily suspended commenting while the posts and comments are moved to the new server.

Update 3: Failure. Attempt 1 used the native Wordpress WXR export/import toolset, which didn’t work. Attempt 2 (today) broke the export/import down per author, which didn’t work. Most annoyingly it strips out <embed> tags of the sort used for YouTube videos.

It looks like I will need to do it “the hard way”, which involves dumping and loading databases after passing them through some data-munging gymnastics. So it looks like troppo will be staying where it is for another week.

I’ve re-enabled comments.

Given that Troppo has relaxed its comments policy, some of you may be puzzled as to why your comments weren’t being posted.

Well there’s two things. First, the Akismet anti-spam service still sometimes comes up with false positives which need to be fetched from the spam bin.

The second thing is that the Wordpress default is to require at least one comment from a ‘new’ commenter to be approved before they go through “on the nod” in future.

I’ve just cleared out about 14 comments from the moderation queue and will keep an eye on it over the next few days.

A while ago I asked my loyal readers (both of you) to help me decide on the best course for the next few years of my life.

The results are in: I have accepted a fulltime position at the Frontier Group here in Perth, and I have accepted a position at UWA as an Honours student. It’s going to be an exciting year.