Sean's Journal
Write Me

With Rev. Kesson's simple request that if I was going to have editors covering certain topics that I consider him for Cryptozology Editor. That was a simple decision to make. As I said to him, anyone who reads the Fortean Times (let alone subscribes!) can pretty much lay claim to any section they want. But now I HAD to do something. I'm a big fan of PHP-Nuke but every project I've used it for died a horrible and malignant death. I got the latest version and began installing it - running into problems I never had before, like unable to untar the stupid file. After realizing the idiots at php-nuke have misnamed the file, I got rolling and dealing with the normal problems I always have with everything, namely file permissions.

I found a theme that I liked and began tweaking it (and I'm still tweaking it, damnit). But now I had the problem of getting the stories moved over to phpnuke out of my homemade system. I decided to tackle it logically. I grabbed my database file from the old system, luckily it was a text file. I then did a mysql dump of the stories table to see exactly what format was needed. Three hours of data cleaning resulted in a reformated data field compliant with mysql and properly escaped quote marks and apostrophes.

Several more hours futzing around with PERL gave me a conversion program that converted all the data from the old system into mysql commands. A quick go at the command line and voila, the stories all appeared in the new system, but there was a problem. They all lacked dates.

I incorrectly formatted the date/time field in my original clean up. I started to manually enter the date and time but realized that for 300 stories at roughly 20 seconds per entry would be nearly 2 hours of uninterrupted typing. That wouldn't do.

I should say that while I use these things, I am far from an expert. I can write a PERL script, but it ain't pretty. I know mysql is there, but it is a big mysterious black box to me. This is why I don't develop anything. It would suck. Yet now I had to take my original file, fix the format and change the time field on each record to match the appropriate date and time in my original file. Yes, it could be argued that the date/time wasn't important, but the issue at hand was whether or not I could do it correctly. I wanted all my old data, whether it was useful or not. More time was spent reading the mysql docs to find the proper format to update a single field in each record. Down and dirty REPLACEing with Word left me with another text file that I could run through mysql. And finally at 10:15 last night, I finished. It worked. Nothing blew up or broke.

I'm mentally exhausted now, but I find myself staring at the new website very pleased, except for some layout issues. Those can wait.