From: Lucian Mogosanu Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 14:33:10 +0000 (+0300) Subject: drafts: Add welcome-to-the-new-tar-pit X-Git-Url: https://git.mogosanu.ro/?a=commitdiff_plain;h=e7cf59a6076c7171da03b84891fab43fde4208e7;p=thetarpit.git drafts: Add welcome-to-the-new-tar-pit --- diff --git a/drafts/000-welcome-to-the-tar-pit.markdown b/drafts/000-welcome-to-the-tar-pit.markdown new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d7fe0f7 --- /dev/null +++ b/drafts/000-welcome-to-the-tar-pit.markdown @@ -0,0 +1,115 @@ +--- +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 < -- 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 < 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