Well, dear readers… It has been a long time since I wrote anything here last. I think there’s little coincidence that the last posting you see here was published right after our first child was born. Those of you with little ones know what I’m talking about. For those of you out there that have maintained a presence in the world outside of diapers and goldfish crackers, held a job down, and stayed married, I am in awe of you. The blog had to go for a while, but I figured it was time to dust the old archive off, migrate it to wordpress and give it another shot. I have had a great number of experiences over the past year helping an organization transition to a more mature use of Agile and have some stuff that I think is worth sharing. I’m also secretly hoping that I can perhaps satisfy my job requirements for publishing content to the industry through this blog. We’ll see.
Oh, and by the way for future reference, any and all opinions represented here are mine, not my employer’s unless otherwise noted.
For anyone who is interested, the adventure heretofore to be known as “the migration story” is a long and gnarled one. My old blog was hosted on a leased server using ThinkJot, a variant of DasBlog. Not using DasBlog was in retrospect a massive mistake that cost me days in trying to come up with a solution for migrating content and comments here. In the end the recipe looked something like this:
Recipe for Migrating a ThinkJot Blog to WordPress
1) Resurrect the old site on my local machine from an archive
2) Add a very very hacked up page to the ThinkJot.Web project with code in it to pull all the content from the existing blog and slop out a blogml file.
3) Discover that wordpress (not the self-hosted version) doesn’t have the plugin to import from blogml formats. Ak!@$@#$!!
4) Think… Think… Discover and use the blog migrator tool to convert the blogml file to a wordpress wxr formatted file.
5) Use the wxr import plugin quasi-successfully, but notice only the last comment got imported.
6) Discover that the blog migrator tool doesn’t add id’s for the comments even though they were in the source blogml file. Arrgh.
7) Manually add id tags for each of the comments using unique integers.
8) Re-import… Success!
9) Edit each post with images in it to point to the new source for images in wordpress.
Glad that’s over.
aaron murrell 