Comments on: Ten Years At the Keyboard

By: Mark Draughn

Mark Draughn — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 23:46:14 +0000

Barron, thanks for the offer. At the moment I think I have a plan that will work. I wrote a program to read in data from the Movable Type database, massage the heck out of it, and write out a WordPress Extended RSS format file for import. It generates a .htaccess file to do all the mappings too.

There’s actually more to it than just the links. I wrote a few custom tags for MT and the tool I wrote has to generate HTML to replace them. It also cleans up some junk, and reports out a list of all the CSS tags used in the blog entries themselves (lists, tables, Q&A formatting, and so on) so I can add definitions of them to the wordpress template.

Most of that is done. The biggest remaining problem is my personal photographs. I currently host them on a photo hosting service, but I’d like to bring them over to the blog’s webserver. This means the program has to find them, download them, re-write image tags, and so on. I need special formatting for the HTML around the images, but I want to be able to maintain it in one place, and I’m not sure if I should use a shortcode or use plain HTML tagged with a special class and rewrite them with Javascript. I need two versions of the image – embedded and large – and I need to be able to resize the embedded one for when I change the column width in the blog template. To top it all off, I’m considering hosting the images in a subdomain so I can route them through a CDN for better speed. Decisions, decisions…

By: Barron Barnett

Barron Barnett — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 18:00:31 +0000

I just stumbled over here the first time from Popehat and wanted to say congrats on 10 years. I just made 4 years past April.

As for your move to WordPress, feel free to drop me an email or contact me. I just recently did a move from Drupal to WordPress while maintaining all my content links. That was a bit of work since there’s no direct path or importer/exporter between the two. I got lucky because Drupal maintains a list of content and clean URL mappings. The posts migrated across maintaining their internal numbering so I wrote a program to create a redirect map for my .htaccess.

All is well and everything appears as it should. I think you’ve been around the block enough it should be a piece of cake.

Congrats again!

By: Mark Draughn

Mark Draughn — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 01:07:28 +0000

Stephanie, yeah, you do. I’ve found that it’s easier if I keep in mind my goals as a blogger. Before responding to some idiot, I ask myself if it will get me somewhere I want to be, or if responding would just be a way of letting him set the agenda. This becomes really important when dealing with unstable people with internet access. You can win an argument with a person, but you can’t win an argument with a personality disorder.

By: Stephanie

Stephanie — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 13:25:08 +0000

Other People Picking On Me: Come at me, bro.

I think that to be a blogger of any significance you have to have a thick skin. :)

By: Mark Draughn

Mark Draughn — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 13:04:04 +0000

Thanks Jack, I may disagree strongly with you at times, but you do the blogging right, and it gives me something to think about. Thanks for stopping by.

By: Jack Marshall

Jack Marshall — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 12:11:37 +0000

Congratulations, Mark, for a rich ten years, but also for doing your job with wit, sincerity, integrity and style.

By: Mark Draughn

Mark Draughn — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 06:02:36 +0000

Missiletoe, hi to you too. It sounds like you understand my punctuation problems exactly. In general, I appreciate the prescriptive rules of English, but some of them seem to have been invented by fussy people with too much time on their hands. I’ve heard, for example, that the “b” in “doubt” has never been pronounced in any version of English, but the scholars who invented the spelling system wanted to highlight its connection to the Latin “dubitare,” which seems like a crazy reason for introducing silent consonants into words.

By: Mark Draughn

Mark Draughn — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 04:40:21 +0000

Thanks Gary. You’re always welcome to post something if you get the urge.

By: Mark Draughn

Mark Draughn — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 04:33:39 +0000

Jamison, thanks for stopping by. So you think I should have been a lawyer? You and my dad both. I appreciate the thought and the kind words, but I think someday I’ll have to do a post explaining why I don’t think I’d be very good at it.

By: Gary O

Gary O — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 04:05:41 +0000

Wow! Ten years already. Thanks for giving me things to think about and the opportunity and encouragement to blog myself. (There’s GOT to be something grammatically incorrect with that sentence.) I will not apologize for not contributing or promise to do so soon. However, I remain hopeful at the prospect. Here’s to the next ten!

By: Jamison

Jamison — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 03:33:54 +0000

Ten years blog time must equal about 30 years in real time. Congratulations. I still think you should have been a lawyer (because you think like one). It is never too late.

By: Missiletoe

Missiletoe — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 01:00:52 +0000

I say don’t get too bogged down in prescriptivist grammar. As a native speaker of English, we are constantly participating in the evolution of the language. If “as if” instead of “like” sounds silted, then it’s out of fashion and on its way out.

And about split infinitives? That’s completely ridiculous. English is for the most part not derived from Latin. (A good chunk of English is derived from French, which evolved from Latin. However, English started as a Germanic language.) The problem is that formal grammar rules were created specifically for Latin, and then applied towards English, for which they are a very poor fit. That’s probably where the “no split infinitives” rule is coming from. But to say you can’t do X in English because you can’t do X in Latin, is totally ridiculous. If native speakers are doing X in English, then it is valid (at the very least for that dialect – I’m a big supporter of descriptivist linguistics if you can’t tell.)

As for your filename saving example, as a web developer I have to agree with you and I think that in the case of writing about technical things like filenames, the regular rules of quotation grammar have to necessarily be suspended. I actually have this probably a lot regarding using URLs in sentences. Like:

Go to http://www.google.com.

I go “ARGH THE PERIOD IS NOT IN THE URL!”
So I try to opt for something like this:

Go to: http://www.google.com

Go to Google (http://www.google.com) and blah blah blah.

I really don’t know why I’m babbling on. This is the first time I’ve read your blog, so hi.

By: Mark Draughn

Mark Draughn — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 23:24:10 +0000

Jennifer! Yeah, it’s been great getting to know you too. Thanks for stopping by.

By: Jennifer

Jennifer — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 22:27:01 +0000

If not for blogging I never would’ve got to know you. So, yay blogs!

By: Mark Draughn

Mark Draughn — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 18:57:20 +0000

Gideon, great to see you! Thanks for stopping by. I’ve enjoyed meeting you too, at least on the internet (maybe I’ll make it up to CT someday). Hope to see more blogging from you as well.

By: Mark Draughn

Mark Draughn — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 18:10:44 +0000

Hi Scott, It’s good to see you. The feeling is mutual. Knowing that you were reading my posts — and that you wouldn’t pull any punches if you thought I wrote something stupid — helped keep me on my toes and encouraged me to think about things a little more carefully. If I had used this post to go more into the history of Windypundit, you and the other crimlaw bloggers would have been a big part of it. The comments got a lot more lively when you showed up, and your links and quotes helped me gain no small degree of legitimacy, and quite a bit more traffic. I’ll always be grateful for that.
And congratulations on your 5000th post. I’m glad you didn’t quit at the 5-year mark after all.

By: Gideon

Gideon — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 17:49:10 +0000

Hi!

Always such a pleasure to read your posts and I think you were the first non-legal blogger who I considered a blogging internet friend type person.

Congratulations on 10 years and here’s to another 10!

By: shg

shg — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 16:30:43 +0000

Congratulations on ten years, Mark. While we’ve come to diverge somewhat over time in our focus and concerns, you were an important influence on my blawging, for which I am grateful.

By: Mark Draughn

Mark Draughn — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 15:46:08 +0000

Heck, Jeff, yours may be the only accolade. My readership is only about a fifth of what it used to be at the height of the blog, having never really recovered from the slump that occurred when my parents passed away.

Thanks for stopping by. I was hoping to hear from you. It was great to meet you for lunch too. (I really do plan to post the pictures one of these days.) Give me a call if you ever find yourself in Chicago, and we’ll do it again.

By: Jeff Gamso

Jeff Gamso — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 13:59:37 +0000

It looks like mine may be the first of the “welcome accolades.”

I haven’t been reading Windypundit for 10 years. Hell, 10 years ago, I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a blog. But I read regularly now. With interest and pleasure.

Here’s to another 10 years!

And, I should add, it was great to meet you. I enjoyed our lunch a lot.