Disposable Software Projects

Let's get one thing straight about the export script

2008-03-06T16:45:39Z

There is no concept of "tag" in the Movable Type Export format. You have two choices right now. Either I ignore tags, or I jam your category list full of tags. Maybe one of these days I'll have nothing better to do than try to modify the export code in Movable Type Open Source to add an export option for tags, but until then, anyone complaining about losing their tags is SOL.

And by SOL I don't mean Virginia's standardized tests.

Capisceme, ora?

A simple function to help newbie MT hackers

2008-01-01T08:42:50Z

For me, one of the biggest problems with figuring out MT is figuring out what what in the @_ array. This little function may be useful for others who are in bad shape like me, to use as a skeleton for figuring out what is being passed to their functions by the MT framework. All of it goes into the system activity log.

sub debug{
   require MT;
   my $index = 0;
   foreach my $item (@_) {
       MT->log({message => $index++ . " " . ref($item)});
   }
}

Some ideas for Movable Type

2007-12-26T06:07:50Z

I am not a Perl programmer, and it shows with the cluelessness that I display toward some of the quirks of Perl from time to time. However, I use Movable Type, and I find its API to be very interesting. Lately I've been starting to figure out how I would go about writing a plug-in for Movable Type 4 that allows you to replicate at least some of the functionality of a hit counter system similar to SiteMeter. I've got some basic code written and in testing now, and if it works out, here's what I expect would be the first four releases of what I am calling, for lack of a better name, MT Site Monitor:

0.25 Initial objects are complete and tested. The initial application framework is in place to allow MT Site Monitor to record hits.
0.50 Basic ability to view the raw log data from your hit counter.
0.75 The ability to designate certain hits as "suspicious," and view them as a separate page from the log viewer.
1.00 More advanced views of the hit data.

If I get beyond that, who knows where it might go?

Another thing, I am trying to figure out the legal and technical feasibility of converting over and hosting some good WordPress themes for Movable Type 4. I have limited time and a lot of bias, so if I can get around to this and be in the clear, I think I would keep to just the themes that my wife likes for her blog. Speaking of her blog, she's been using WordPress for some time now due to the themes that it has, and WordPress 2.3 seems to have killed all of her favorite themes. Why am I not surprised?...

**UPDATE** 1/1/2008: It would be just my luck that not only is there a good plug-in which provides much of the functionality that I wanted to implement with MTSiteMonitor, but the author of it would be the guy who helped me on the mt-dev mailing list to figure out how to use the template tag which is vital to displaying tables in Movable Type's framework. What I may do is see if I can add some of the functionality that I want to the VisitorStats plug-in, in the form of a small plug-in that extends on the objects that he wrote. Well, I'm grateful for the help, nonetheless and so in the spirit of doing right by the guy who helped me out, I'm not going to turn his generosity against him by competing with him.

Anyone try the new WXR importer in Movable Type 4.0?

2007-12-19T18:12:10Z

I wrote my export script a while ago, back when there was a real need for it for WordPress 2.0-2.1 and Movable Type 3.3. Movable Type 4.X includes an importer for WordPress' content that is exported as RSS data. Anyone switching to Movable Type from WordPress really ought to give that a shot, as it is going to be a lot better supported by Sixapart, than my export script is going to be supported by me these days.

Instructions on how to run the export script

2007-11-21T06:41:04Z

Whoops... forgot to migrate the instructions for how to run the script from my main blog to this one.
]]> Run the PHP script in your WordPress directory. Your directory structure should look something like this:

/
--->wp-config.php
--->wp-export-mt.php
--->wp-includes/
--->wp-includes/wp-db.php

Remember, there are two versions of the script. One for pre-2.3 versions of WordPress, and one for version 2.3.

**Update** 11/29/2007: This guy raises a good point. You need to change the name of the file from txt to php in order for it to execute on the server once you upload it.

WordPress 2.3-friendly version of my export script

2007-10-18T01:37:14Z

Grab it here. Bugs? Leave me a detailed description of what went wrong, including error messages.

WordPress 2.3 and my export script

2007-10-15T18:23:48Z

WordPress 2.3 dropped a few tables that were used in previous versions of WordPress that my script assumed to exist. I have no idea why the WordPress team saw fit to make this change, as I cannot see how they gained anything from merging tags and categories into the terms table. Seems to me to be an asinine way of changing things, but we already know that I am not all that big on WordPress anymore. I've got a preliminary fix in the works that works on a VMware image of Xubuntu where I have installed a copy of WordPress 2.3 on a typical LAMP setup. I'm not ready to release it into the wild yet because I haven't really had a chance to test it out yet. I'll finish up the testing tonight, and hopefully have it uploaded here.

Here's a new version of the export script

2007-07-25T21:08:16Z

Download it here. It contains a bug fix for the trackback output that generates the dates the same way that it does for the comments. Let's call this... version 1.3....

What Movable Type 4.0 hath wrought

2007-06-14T09:16:14Z

I installed Movable Type 4.0 on a test domain and database, and lo and behold, it appears that they have completely dropped the original import system. This means that if my WordPress to Movable Type Export script is to be able to help out people who are using Movable Type 4.0 (when it comes out of beta), I will have to rewrite much of it from scratch. The new backup system is actually very slick, but it is actually now for storing an entire blog it would seem. That's a real change from the days when it just exported entries, comments and trackbacks.

Well, that's one aborted idea

2007-06-06T09:59:09Z

I spent about thirty minutes trying to grok the code for MySQL Connector/J earlier today, and I ended up giving up on it. I was trying to read it in order to get an understanding of what you have to do to write a something that can communicate directly with MySQL as part of a preliminary investigation into writing a new Python driver for MySQL. To do it right would require me to learn far more about all of the options that MySQL has, and the ins and outs of how MySQL works to ever be worth it, so I just gave up. Doesn't seem to be any harm in that, in my opinion. I just don't have the energy to bring myself to care enough to try something like that, especially since I don't even have any side projects that would require a pure Python driver. The current driver unfortunately relies on a foundation written in C, which makes it a non-starter for mixing into web applications written in Python. A shame, really.

On a different note, one thing that might be useful as web applications go is a supplemental XML-RPC API for Movable Type that allows you to hook into proprietary features like rebuilding pages and such. That and a Python API that wraps it on the server side might be worth looking at.

Preemptive FAQ

2007-03-13T23:52:36Z

Why did you start this separate blog?

My main blog is not really appropriate for posting work on software development projects. I just needed a place where I could post things that I have written that might be of some marginal utility to others beside me. I guess that is sort of a given, since I don't do anything that is so far removed from what most people do that my coding efforts would be only useful to me. Needless to say, the reason this blog exists is to collect all of my work as a hobbyist software developer.

What license do you use?

I think that all depends. I had to grudgingly put the Limited Use Password Plugin under the GNU GPL because it borrowed a few lines of code from one of the WordPress files that handles that sort of thing. The rest of my work is not really licensed per se. I am going to keep the copyright on it firmly, but beyond that, I don't think it's really much of a concern for me right now. The licensing terms are pretty simple:

You may use it without paying for it.
You may give it to others without paying for it.
You may not modify the code, claim credit for the project and/or sell it without my written permission.

Similar to the GNU GPL, but not as restrictive, I guess.

WordPress To Movable Type Export Script 1.2

2007-03-05T21:35:04Z

I incorporated Jim Carson's bug fixes into the script, and now for lack of a better version number, it's been moved up to version 1.2. So far, so good with the export. I tested it on my fiance's blog without any discernible problems. Obviously, if you encounter any bugs, please leave a good description of the bugs in the comments section.

Download it here.

Check these out

2007-03-02T23:27:42Z

The following are some free and/or open source programs that you may not have heard about, but that are worth having:

TrueCrypt - disk encryption made easy. It will allow you to create encrypted drives and disk images, making it so that everything you write to them is transparently encrypted on the fly for you. As long as TrueCrypt is running, everything happens behind the scenes so you don't have to do anything like run your files through an encryption app to decrypt them before using them.
Eraser - securely move and delete files, as well as purge the free space on your hard drive of anything that you don't want others to get access to later on. This sort of app is also called a "file shredder" because of the way that it systematically chews up the data associated with the files and free space you tell it to work on.
Sage - the easiest way to keep track of the blogs you read. It is a Firefox plugin that integrates as a side panel. If you have to use Firefox (I can't stand using Opera with proxy servers) then it's the way to go.

WordPress To Movable Type Export Script 1.1

2007-02-23T06:03:02Z

If you need to export your WordPress database to Movable Type's export file format, you can use this script which leverages WordPress' APIs to make it relatively easy to move back and forth between these two blog suites. It's free, no license. Download here.