Niels’ Homepage

Are the heaviest. Or so they say in Dutch. It means that the last task you have to do is the hardest.

This is just a message to let you know that the internal links should now all point to the correct places within this web site and that this website is now fully functional.

The overview of the archives in the sidebar was a bit too verbose to my taste. So in a natural reflex (stupid software engineers) I studied how to write my own archive list creation function. Luckily I thought of searching for a WordPress plugin that filled my needs. Thanks again!

The default WordPress theme is so….

DEFAULT!

So I went searching on the web for nice themes and this was the one I really liked. Only a few minor tweaks were necessary thus far.

Check out the creator’s site, he has lots more where this came from. Thanks!

One item of the list. If you look to the sidebar then you might notice that there is a link to a download section again. It was a bit of a puzzle to create this one as I like my download pages to appear as simple as possible, i.e. just as file pages in my browser. But when I created the subdirectory I got a 403 Forbidden message.

After some searching I found that it could be solved in the following way:

1. Create the subdirectory in your website’s root.
2. Create a page of the same name in WordPress.
3. Add Options +indexes to the top of the .htaccess file in the root directory of your website. Make sure that the subdirectories do not contain any .htaccess files.
4. Make sure that the downloads directory and its subdirectories file permissions are set to 755 and that the permissions of the files that are stored in there are set to 644.

So now just the tedious task of validating links in my posts is left before this site is fully functional again.

As mentioned I converted this weblog to use WordPress as a CMS.

My initial thought was to write an import filter to have my Nanoblogger based data converted. But Diona convinced me to do it by hand (OK, writing the import filter probably does take more time).

The initial import of all the posts, galleries and categories is now finished. The things that are left to do are:

1. Give all downloadable files a place on this site. If this will be done in WordPress has to be seen.
2. Validate all links in the posts.

Probably there is more left, but now I have at least reached a point where I find I can use this site again for what is has been intended.

At least the manual conversion is a good excuse to get to know WordPress and to find out that at least all the functionality I had with Nanoblogger can be replaced.

1. For the gallery replacement I used myGallery. It has the simplicity I like in a plugin, and has at least the same functionality as the Nanoblogger Gallery plugin.
2. And for the source code syntax high lighting I found WP-Syntax. It has not as much languages to choose from as my own solution but it gets the work done nicely.

As you may notice this website’s content management system is no longer the Bash driven NanoBlogger. It became just too cumbersome to run it from the command line and keep the site’s source synchronized between several computers. Even after creating my own tool to do it. So I took the easy route an installed WordPress instead. So now I can hopefully keep putting stuff on the web.

I would like to thank some people for reminding me that I should really do something with this site. If my better half is right it shouldn’t take too long to have (most) of the old contents back on this site.