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+---
+postid: 000
+title: Welcome to The Tar Pit! again.
+date: October 11, 2019
+author: Lucian Mogoșanu
+tags: meta
+---
+
+*Hello, world!*  
+*The Tar Pit is now unofficially a candidate for the highest number of
+introductory posts in a blog.*
+
+Seriously now though, I have to celebrate the mp-wpization of this
+blog *somehow*, don't I? And how else than through a brand new
+introductory article? Well, here we are then.
+
+I'd initially estimated that migrating from [ye olde
+LBS][thetarpit-lbs] to [MP-WP][mp-wp] [would take][tmsr-work-v] some
+(at the time estimated to be significant) amount of pain and some (at
+the time unknown) amount of time. To be completely fair, I only had a
+vague idea of where this was going, so ultimately I found it
+appropriate to determine the amount of both pain and time through
+direct experience. Now, the man-hours involved are the simple part: I
+spent around twenty-five hours importing the articles, by writing a
+couple of scripts that read the content from the old database and
+insert it into the new one. Of these, about ten consisted of "coding"
+and another fifteen were involved in testing the code and verifying
+all the posts... though to be fair, I am having someone proofread the
+entire blog at this very moment, which is still work, although not
+exactly mine, though... anyway, I'll publish the code very soon for
+whomever might be interested. Add to this another circa five hours of
+bringing up the theme in its current state and the (yet-to-be-spent)
+few hours required to clean it up and you get the total time required
+to get a The Tar Pit up and running.
+
+As for the pain, I'm not sure this can be measured in anything other
+than "what the fuck happened here"s. Pressing and installing MP-WP was
+entirely painless; initial configuration and importing usefuls from
+[the old blog][bricks] was really easy; tweaking the theme to my needs
+was okay, although it still needs work before publishing; getting this
+scaffolding to work with all the existing content was somewhat of a
+pain in the ass.
+
+For one, I had to make a choice. The fact that many years ago I took
+to writing my posts in the Markdown is no secret: this may be
+construed as intellectual wankery, whatever, I don't care; The Tar Pit
+articles came stored as Markdown files, so I had to either convert
+them to HTML and dump them into the new blog, or keep them as they are
+and use a Wordpress plug-in that eats Markdown and spits HTML; which I
+had been using before 2013, which is I chose the latter.
+
+Unfortunately, there's a marked difference between
+[Pandoc][i-wrote-a-blog] and the PHP Markdown thing -- by the way, I'm
+also going to post this as a V patch on top of MP-WP; for all I know,
+nobody else cares about this, and yet this isn't a reason not to make
+it public. So what I did was to import the posts year by year, check
+that the page is correctly rendered and make corrections where
+needed. This, by the way, wasn't as much work as I thought it would
+be.
+
+The pain came, as things usually tend to go with intellectual work,
+from striving to understand things. For example
+[wp\_insert\_post][wp-insert-post] sanitizes the input before storing
+it in the Wordpress database, which is a good thing. More precisely,
+among others, it removes bogus (non-HTML) tags, so, things that come
+between angular brackets -- I'm not sure why this is needed, it's not
+like I'm going to start dumping malicious input into my posts, but
+whatever, it's ok. Ok? Well, it seems that some of my posts came with
+stuff stored between "less-than" and "greater-than", which got
+arbitrarily eaten; which means that I'd have to convert some of those
+to HTML entities, the ampersand thing, you know, only just some, not
+all of them.
+
+Except, this is when I found out that Wordpress' editor is broken,
+because it converts entities to their rendered counterparts each time
+I update/save the post. On one hand this proved to be useful, because
+it converted some of my &lt -- by the way, notice how I'm avoiding
+placing these in the post? -- to the correct symbol; and at the same
+time, it was a fucking pain in the ass, since some particular &lt I
+*do* want to keep the way it is. Actually, let's reproduce the bug:
+assuming if you have a MP-WP installation, start a new draft post,
+then input the following piece in the content box:
+
+~~~~
+<b>this is a quoted bold text</b>
+~~~~
+
+then save/preview the post. It shows what you expect, i.e. the tags
+and the text, right? Now save/preview it again. What do you see now?
+No, I don't want to hear that "that's what it's supposed to do". I
+input something, then save the content and the content is transformed
+into something other than what I've inputted. If not insanity, then
+what the hell is this?
+
+Other than this, exploring the MP-WP code isn't nearly as mind-numbing
+as one would expect. I for one haven't done this in six years and yet
+I can find my way around it pretty easily, which is how right now I
+have a working theme, comments, [external trackbacks][logz-1940067]
+and [selection][tmsr-work-v]. There's still plenty of work to be done,
+from figuring out why the hell internal trackbacks aren't sending to
+looking into [the image uploader][logz-1940643] to perhaps replacing
+the HTML post editing interface with something else entirely.
+
+Anyway, as I was saying, welcome to The new Tar Pit! Enjoy your stay
+here and feel free to use all this new nifty functionality it comes
+with.
+
+[thetarpit-lbs]: /2019/thetarpit-lbs-genesis
+[mp-wp]: http://thewhet.net/2018/06/mp-wp-genesis-regrind/
+[tmsr-work-v]: /2019/tmsr-work-v?b=since&e=time.#select
+[bricks]: http://lucian.mogosanu.ro/bricks/
+[i-wrote-a-blog]: /2016/i-wrote-a-blog?b=Pandoc&e=,#select
+[wp-insert-post]: http://archive.is/Tvkag
+[logz-1940067]: http://logs.ossasepia.com/log/trilema/2019-10-04#1940067
+[logz-1940643]: http://logs.ossasepia.com/log/trilema/2019-10-05#1940643