Hopefully you’ve realised that I’m not posting at sqlblog.com any more. There’s still some excellent content there, but it has come up time and time again that I should be posting at a company blog site – so the move has now been made. I’ve also brought across the material that I wrote at msmvps.com, which had also been Community Server until a few years ago when it became WordPress.
Adam Machanic (@AdamMachanic) had put together some C# code for moving posts off Community Server (which is what sqlblog uses) onto WordPress, and combined with a regular WordPress Export + Import from msmvps.com, I had most of my content moved over. I don’t code in C# very often these days, but it felt nice. I spent some time in PowerShell and XML tweaking dates in the WordPress export file to make sure they matched the time zone that I’d originally used, which introduced some frustrating character-mapping that needed fixing in MySQL, so all in all I felt like I was moving around a variety of toolsets that I don’t often swim in.
A big thanks again to Barb and Susan who host msmvps.com still – they (particularly Barb) have helped a lot with sorting out some of my content from the old site. Some things are still broken from years back, but they did find the picture of me with Desmond Tutu, so I’m happy. At some point I’ll be going through old posts and seeing what doesn’t work.
I no longer use Categories – I lost the msmvps.com categories when they moved to WordPress, and the sqlblog.com ones didn’t seem to want to come across either. I don’t know that I ever did categories particularly well, so perhaps it’s a good opportunity to stop pretending that I do. Not everything should within a ‘sql’ category.
I discovered that I have quite a bit of content that needed to use a ‘powershell’ formatting. There is still a bunch of formatting on old posts that I won’t get to for some time though (there’s almost 500 posts, so I’ll take a bit of a run at the rest another day).
I had to install some plugins to get a few things to work. SyntaxHighlighter was one, but also RWD’s Responsive Image Maps to get an image map from an old T-SQL Tuesday round-up working. I tried a stats plugin, only to find that I needed a later version of PHP to support it. Luckily I don’t think I was showing an error for too long, but I’m really not keen on the error messages that WordPress gives.
CSS was a bit of fun to get the “Popular Posts” to look similar to the “Recent Posts”. I ended up just finding a way to have the Popular Posts widget use the same CSS class as the Recent Posts.
And it turns out I do like the Segoe font-face. I know it’s Microsoft’s one, and perhaps that’s what makes it feel right for me – I spend so long looking at Microsoft web pages it feels quite natural to me. Since we deal almost entirely in the Microsoft space, it’s quite appropriate too. We’ll probably use the same when we do a rebranding of our company site.
