Randolph This is a boring post. Trust me. I’m just writing it down to remind myself.
The first version of my blog was hand-coded. Whenever I wanted to add a new entry, I created the HTML page, updated all the links, and so on.
In around 2005 or 2006, I moved over to Simple PHP Blog, which allowed me to add a “related link” to every post. This was really neat, because it worked like a link blog (I had no idea, back then, that’s what the cool kids were calling it). Meanwhile, the rest of my website stayed static, because I felt (and still do) that static HTML is better for slowly-changing content.
Then I moved the blog to WordPress in 2009, using my SimplePHPBlogToWordPressConverter (yes, I know it’s a long name), I created a reference in the wp_postmeta table to the related link where appropriate, and then edited my theme so that the related link would still display.
In November 2011, I decided to migrate my entire site, including blog, to WordPress. Since I wanted to change the URL structure to not have the blog in a wp/ folder, I decided to export it to a new instance of WordPress, and deal with the related links later.
Then I forgot about them. There were almost 300 in total, or just under one third of the total blog posts at that time. The old wp/ folder is still there, because I didn’t have the heart to take it down and lose that history.
I’ve now decided to resolve this properly. There are around 200 or so posts that need to be edited to bring the “related link” back into the post body. I felt this was more sensible than modifying the theme again, because as usually happens with this sort of thing, when I find a new theme or have to upgrade the existing one, I don’t want the trouble of editing it to included that pesky related link.
It’s a manual process. Using PHPMyAdmin in one window to get the post ID, I edit the post in another window to include the related link. Since I’m flying out to Chicago tomorrow, I won’t spend too long on it tonight, but it will finally bring closure to a process that started in August 2009, with the initial WordPress migration.
Seriously, I warned you this was boring.