Import of Movable Type Backups

18:51 – MT XML readied for import. There are a total of six different blogs being loaded into the tuba: Blog, Dead City Radio, The Dualist, Observer Effect, Transitional Voices and Universe. I’m leaving out Utility, as anything it controlled can be regenerated. FUCK was never backed up as it never contained any comic-relevant data – FUCK was an exta blog instance I spun up when I realized I’d accidentally on purpose deleted a bunch of not-critical-at-that-moment templates from each of the active blogs – one of thousands of little “learning by doing” incidents that have occurred over the life of the comic.

So, we’re GO for import. Let’s see how long that takes – alphabetically, from the top!

18:55 – Shit it’s downloading every page I’ve ever linked to on the site. This is going to get nasty. Import directory is XML file plus 136 extras. Dashboard reports 150 posts and 71 comments.

Go for DCR at 18:57. Import directory now has 222 extraneous files; asset attachments are not transferring. This is actually a good thing, at least for my bandwidth. Dashboard reports 294 posts, 117 comments.

19:02 – Holy crap halloween Land of the Lost is opening strong.

19:04 – Checking the CHUNKED backup of The Dualist against the unchunked. GO FOR DUALIST. Fantastic it’s downloading the entire first edition just what I needed. Inline images are jerks!

19:07 – COMMENCE TWIDDLING OF THUMBS READY GO

19:10 – Bela’s undead. Poor Bela. :(

19:19 – There goes reflex -3-. Scary monsters. Super freaks. Keep me running, running scared…

19:26 – Import of The Dualist complete. 1,261 extraneous files now in the import directory. Dashboard reads 660 posts and 120 comments. Yes, there are three comments on The Dualist. You bastards.

19:28 – Go for OE.

19:28 – Well. That was quick. 1,266 extraneous, 670 posts, 128 comments.

19:30 – Go on TV import. 1,324; 739, 130.

19:32 – Universe. 1,363 total extraneous. 859 posts, 47 categories, 158 tags. That looks right… and with the MT instance nuked I can’t directly verify so I’ll have to dig up the record I made around the time I announced the migration.

Fuck. My file says 903 entries, 158 tags, 8 pages. Pages didn’t make it but I expected that; tags add. If I pulled “903” out of the System instead of adding it from blogs then it’s counting Utility and FUCK and that might be throwing things off. Fortunately I logged the entry counts for each of the six imported sections so now I get to do MATH! :D

870. Dashboard only shows published posts. In the Posts section All is (870).

Whew.

Purging the import directory and wiping media before things get out of hand. Media library claims 1,280 entities. Yow. Setting the list to 400 items per page and blowing it away in four shots. 400 is enough to make the AMP stack spike the box.

Activate Codepress Admin Columns. Settings, Media Library, drop the Icon. Fixed. Media library purged, icon re-enabled. As mentioned previously if you’re just doing a quick migration and want it over with this part is totally unnecessary – but I want a clean site.

Turns out MTBI ignores Category heirarchies – there are some zeroes that used to be “parents” – “Cast” for example is a zero category on the same level as Daedalus, which has six items in it. In MT Daedalus was a child of Cast. Not a big deal at the moment, really. Time to create NEW categories to make pre-sorting all of this data easier.

Set drafts to private; will be using Draft status in bulk editing efforts.

20:28 – Created four “00” categories and shoveled everything in – 00 BLOG, 00 CAST, 00 COMIC, 00 GLOSSARY. All 00’d so they list at the very top. Not an issue for the first three but I had to wade into scrollbar to get to the Glossary, so.

First dip into the edit window – a blog post from December 07 2009 about CAPTCHAs.

The number-shoveling isn’t adding up. 00 COMIC is off by three and 00 BLOG is off by a bunch. This complicates things, as there’s no easy way to list POST NOT IN directly in the back-end. At least not that I’m aware of.

20:50 – BRO DO YOU EVEN BATCH EDIT

Okay, everything actually ads up now. Finally. It’s a holiday in Cambodia!

20:56 – Loaded the comic changelog. This reminds me that I need to find and remove all
tags before I have to start manually correcting line breaks in IRC logs.

21:01 – FUCK IT’S BEEN AMONTHECHOSEN THE WHOLE TIME

21:03 – Fixed. Finally loaded some themed content when I accidentally went to root – first trip into the front end, and it’s still running Twenty Thirteen.

Initial theme configuration

21:16 – Cloned twentyeleven. Replaced functions.php with the functions.php from Noise; took a hatchet to the extraneous files I know for a fact I won’t be using. Bulk replace function calls (‘noise’ and ‘twentyeleven’ for ‘amongthechosen’); on the home stretch. Among other edits, a post_thumbnail loop to help with verifying posts.

21:45 – Successfully bull-in-a-china-shopped my way into a working theme, yay! Had to tweak the sidebar and content files to make everything Go but Go it does. Basically. Now with more of Noise in its DNA than I’d like but I can at least start working on the content, I think. Maybe. Fixing links is something like 90% of the repair work that needs to be done, so I’m looking at either one very long tortured structured slog through the work, or an initial blast of getting everything vetted and connected FOLLOWED BY a second run through the content AFTER it’s been kicked into CPTs.

22:08 – We’re not having fun anymore. Now… now it gets ugly, and stays there for a good long while. Or what’s going to seem like a good long while. All the basics are in place for first pass media reconnection and post vetting; I’m just waiting for a few thousand files to copy into a migration directory so I can start hacking away.

I could do this stage with the default theme but frankly I’m not a fan of Twenty Thirteen – this site is going to be built from the Twenty Eleven theme and I’d just as soon be running some version of “production” templates from here on out.

Media load-in

22:26 – Man. I get to rebuild one UGLY data “structure.” If the “content” is a tree from which the house of the site is built, I’ve got a pile of wood chips and a bottle of glue and some leaves. This was expected, honestly – I built the DCRN first because I knew that if I did ATC first I’d say “fuck it” and just abandon the DCRN. I had my fun there. The fun here doesn’t start until I get to CPTs and I’m not doing those until I’ve got some Posts to Custom Type. I could technically dive in now but I’ve had serious problems with Admin Post Navigation working in any capacity with CPTs, so I’m doing my major wading and slogging and complaining about it while everything is still in Posts, which is a thing WordPress is literally built to handle. So. With all further ado and 30 minutes left on LotL, I’m starting ATCv11 vetting in the same place I started ATCvSomething load-in back in 2008 – Transitional Voices chapter one.

22:59 – Got the last page of Earth loaded during post-LotL station identification. Woohoo! Looks like it wants to do Water next, which supports my theory that admin post navigation links everything up by post ID as opposed to date – it’s reading through the TV blog and that’s fine, as it’s a small one!

23:13 – Water loaded.

23:19 – Observer Effect loaded.

23:32 – Whitehouse loaded.

23:46 – The Operative loaded.

20131026, 00:01 – Leitmotif loaded.

00:11 – Provision loaded. I’ve forgotten the script uploads for this chapter and Leitmotif – realized that about halfway into the load-in on this chapter. Will finish DCR pages then break for the night; script load-in tomorrow. SNACK BREAK NOW.

00:33 – Target loaded. Now for the script.

01:02 – Past my bedtime. DCR is loaded, DCR script is loaded. CHECKED stands at 223 out of 870, with all of that comics. Tomorrow: The Dualist. Tonight: Backup and bed.

08:35 – I’m up, I’m UP. Still gotta eat breakfast and take the morning walk, so probably no work on ATC until around 10. Lots to do today!

10:16 – Some numbers: I shoveled 348 images into the database last night. There are 415 remaining in the “comic” directory and 697 in the “td1e” directory. Neither directory includes any Universe or Blog or Gallery material. Some of these are dupes, some of them are unused – not all of them will be loaded into the tuba, but all of them will be landing in the 00 UP directory inside the “comic” directory. The comics I reconstructed last night were all pretty straightforward – with The Dualist I have to deal with TD1E as well as the comic itself.

10:30 – Go on The Dualist.

11:51 – Incursion went in easily; Signal took flippin’ forever. At this rate the load-in is going to be a two-day thing instead of a one-day inconvenience.

12:41 – Convergence loaded. Replaced the h3 tag on First Edition Metadata with an h1 globally. Lunch, then Reentry.

13:48 – Stretching, then rolling on Clarity. At 53 pages with cover it’s bigger than any two recent chapters combined!

14:45 – Another stretch, then Expulsion

14:51 – That went nice and quick. On to Motion.

15:45 – Motion is in, and I’m on break. A bit of other work, then walk2. Will resume load-in sometime between 17:30 and 18:30. CHECKED is at 473 – past the halfway point!

18:33 – Just started Subversion, though I need to stretch again and see if I can get my right thigh to stop feeling like it’s fallen off. 43 comic pages and covers left to load. REMINDER, as I just zipped past this page – BE SURE TO ADDRESS HOW THAD’S BRAIN SURVIVED A BULLET IN TV.3 OR TV.4. I know, but I figure the readers might want to be let in on it at some point…

19:25 – CHECKED? 589. 00 COMIC? Also 589. Time for the blog.

20:22 – CHECKED at 748, which adds. Didn’t miss anything on the blog. DINNER BREAK and the back nine of Maximum Overdrive, then it’s into the Cast and/or Glossary. Actually the way Admin Post Navigation parses the import it’ll be The Universe, in whatever order I created it in. Which is not in sequence.

22:03 – CHECKED at 870. That’s the post content loaded, though I still have to reconstruct the galleries and other page-based content. I considered preserving the v10 build log as one of those pages but the fact is it’ll live on just fine tucked inside a tarball – there’s nothing of future value there, and this one will eventually have the same fate.

23:09 – Candy is in. Links are staying out. I’ll add this build log at a later date – it’s a text file outside of WordPress and staying that way, at least for tonight. Each of the v10 Candy galleries were custom work – this time around things are going to be standardized.

Subtracting Walk1/Walk2 and sleep, media load-in took about 13.5 hours for 870 posts – that’s just the images, not links. I’m not starting on those until permalinks are finalized and when I do roll on link fixes it’ll probably be with an eye towards removal. A good-sized chunk of the stuff I loaded in today is cruft, and a lot of it may wind up buried under a subscriber loop (comic metadata), disabled (older blog posts), or ultimately deleted or rewritten (blog posts; cast/glossary). I rebooted the blog with the 2008 migration from MT 3 to MT 4; I may do that again here.

23:48 – Chatting with xeno on IRC and “watching” (or rather, almost totally ignoring) Taken 2. I get the feeling that the script is the product of a bet – either to win one (“I’ll bet you can’t write a sequel to Taken!”) or because somebody lost one (“Pay up, or write a sequel to Taken – your choice!”). I can’t really tell one way or the other and I don’t really care one way or the other. I’m done for the night – my right hand is griping, my brain is goopier than usual, and I’m effectively exhausted.