Windypundit On WordPress

This is it, the new WordPress version of Windypundit. There are lots of tweaks and changes still to come, but I think I can go ahead and make the switch now and worry about the details later.

Some of you may have noticed that Windypundit was off the air for a while. Yeah, well, it turns out the switchover didn’t go quite the way I planned.

About a week and a half ago, the hosting company I’ve been using for Windypundit sent out a message saying they would be moving some of my other domains to a new server in December. The message included this warning:

On the new servers PHP 5.3.x is going to be running, so please take the measures to ensure that you have your software up to date to avoid any conflict with the new PHP version, take in mind that we can’t keep PHP 5.2.x running in our servers since is already EOL.

Then last weekend they sent out another message about the server that I was using for Windypundit:

Emergency Server Migration – Server 34 – Do not ignore this email.

Server 34 is using a OS version that’s not longer supported by Cpanel, for that reason some package are not being updated and is causing troubles on the DNS and making the server fail. We are going to make an emergency migration tonight to a new server.

A little later, the Windypundit site failed, displaying a variety of PHP errors. My guess is that the emergency server migration put Windypundit on one of the new servers with the new version of PHP. As I’ve mentioned, I lost the ability to upgrade Movable Type long ago, and I guess the version I’ve been using isn’t compatible with the new version of PHP.

Despite all the nice things I’ve said about my hosting provider, I’d been having some problems in the last couple of weeks, and I had been exploring the possibility of switching to a new provider. Having the blog go down like this was the last straw. I’ve moved Windypundit and all my other sites to a hosting company called A Small Orange, about which I’ve heard good things. (Low-cost shared hosting is something of a crapshoot, so we’ll see.)

I’ve spend most of my spare time in the last week on a crash program to finish the port to WordPress. I had to make a few more changes to the conversion tool I wrote to handle some problems with implied paragraphs, and I had to make a bunch more changes to the CSS. I spent a lot of time just paging through Windypundit posts for the first four years and the last two years, one after another, looking for problems.

I discovered a few pages that are messed up. Many of them can be fixed with more CSS changes or by editing individual posts. I haven’t found any new systematic problems caused by the port process in the last few hundred posts I checked, and the site passes all of the automated tests I ran, so I decide it was time to put Windypundit back online.

I still have a lot of changes to make — enabling comments, configuring statistics, tweaking the theme — but I think I’m ready to go live. Here’s hoping it all works.

Update: I want to make sure comments are working, so it will help if a few of you will leave a comment.