Rick Hurst - Freelance Web developer. Bristol, England.

this is the internet equivalent of trying to organise my CD collection - wait- that’s not too difficult, i’m giving most of my cd’s to a charity shop as I prefer digital only these days. I think my “readers” are getting a bit confused when I jump between posts about coffee and posts about geekery. no. those two go together perfectly. Anyway, i’m going to add some categories, and try to retro-categorise some of the old posts over time. RSS subscribers may see old posts reappaer for a few days/weeks/months/years

so far so good although can’t be bothered to write much with the on-screen keyboard!

I’ve cleared out a bit more of the remaining pages of the old site, just as a decluttering exercise. Nobody has complained so far of missing content (well in fact nobody has commented on anything at all so far, and there was me worried about having to deal with loads of comments.. hmm.. better check that they actually work!), but if you have found yourself on this site following a listing on google and you can’t find what you are looking for, even with the search, please let me know and i’ll try to retrieve it.

PloneCaptcha has been shoved onto my radar by Tom Lazar. read all about it over there because I haven’t got anything to add other than that if Tom gets on with it i’ll install it on dfr skate zine (currently “offline”)(except not really), and enable anaonymous comments, seeing as noone can be bothered to sign up to comment.

This is just a mandatory “i’m just trying out another desktop blogging tool” post. I’ve just downloaded flock, mainly to see if the built in blogging tool is a suitable solution for OSX. So far so good - not sure whether this thing supposts categories, although I haven’t actually got any categories yet so…

edit: yes it does support categories.

just for the record, if you were wondering why there are very few comments on this site, it is because I previously didn’t have commenting enabled on the old site, so nothing was imported across in the way of comments. I’ve got it enabled on here since the move to wordpress (with moderation activated to protect against comment spam), so feel free to opine on any of the unsubstantiated claims I make on this site, or question my grammar/ spelling/ complete misunderstanding.

i’ve set up some redirects from my old asp xml blogger archives to the relevant archive page on the new wordpress site. This was fairly easy - I have used a custom 404 page on the old site to check for requests for pages in the format YYYYMMarchive00x.asp, then extract the date and month and redirect based on that. The old blog used to be set up into seperate blogs for different subjects e.g. linux, photography etc, but I have now imported all (most?) of the old content into the same blog. I will no doubt have missed something! If you are looking for something in particular that used to be there but you now can’t find let me know and i’ll have a look for it.

I have to praise whoever wrote the RSS importer for wordpress - this made it incredibly easy to drag content in from the old feeds. It was to my advantage that I didn’t have categorisation or comments enabled on the old blog as I guess these would have to be handled seperately but it meant that I could do the migration with no custom scripting whatsoever - one of the reasons for going with wordpress. Quills/ Plone blog developers take note - import tools will massively increase uptake. I think many people like me who have defected to wordpress could be tempted back if there are any one-step import tools in the final product.

so if all has gone to plan, my hypothecate.co.uk RSS feed should have burst back into life and anybody subscribed to my old RSS should now be reading the feed from www.rickhurst.co.uk, my new personal blog / portfolio site, running on wordpress.

so lets get this right , I spent hours and hours migrating hypothecate to plone then binned it and went for wordpress instead? yep. For the last six years or so I have always used (much appreciated) free webspace from people I know, but this always tied me to a platform - first ASP, then zope/plone. Now I have another personal project running on Plone (www.dfrskatezine.com - ironically currently offline while I migrate it from plone 2.1 to 2.5), I thought I would stump up for some paid webspace so I could run some php/ mysql stuff without relying on favours and harrassing people to install and configure stuff for me.

The new site has a bit of a portfolio on it, as I am pimping myself for a bit of non-plone freelance work (out of hours - i’m still happily esconced by day ploning away at netsight hq), so any bits of web development work you need doing, contact me and I might be able to help you out, and you might be able to help me replace my dying car

Now I have working blog software again, I might even start posting a bit more often - still on the same theme - web technology with random inane drivel thrown in.

The old site will eventually redirect here, and I will do my best to not leave any dead links, by setting up some redirects. In an ideal world I would retro-categorise all the imported content on here.

As for quills etc have I completely given up? no - quills should make an appearance on the skate site in the near future.