I’ve been working on the look of gallery a bit too… now it looks a bit less like it did in 1998. I think it might actually be easier to use, too.

That’s right, folks, I’m entering the world of 2005 right here and now: inline flash video! I felt I should do it so I could bring you the genius of The Michael Showalter Showalter:

These guys have been hit or miss since The State, but I think this is them back at the top of their game.

As I seem to do every couple of years, I’ve once again undertaken to fix up overt a bit. As you can see, things look a bit different already, but as all web developers do, I have more and bigger plans in the offing.

Yes, it has come to this. To comment on overt now you have to prove that you’re not a machine. I’m using both one of those type-in-code thingys and also running comments through Spamassassin. Always with the arms race, naughty little spammers.

Long-time overt readers will remember when I rolled my own photo gallery using ColdFusion and an Access database. A few years ago I replaced my own software with Gallery, a PHP-based photo album that was way better than anything I wrote could ever be. It had it’s faults, like storing everything in flat files and being kind of ugly, but it was very functional.

A couple of years ago they started on a rewriting of Gallery from the ground up, based on a mySQL backend for speed and all CSS’ed up for prettiness. It’s taken a while, but the code is finally ready for prime-time so I moved overt’s gallery over to the new version. Such excitement! It looks exactly the same! But it should give a lot more flexibility in the future, plus I get to stick these nifty “random photo” blocks everywhere now (see right). Let me know if something looks borked to you. I know that viewing comments on pics still kind of sucks, I’m thinking about writing something myself to fix it up.

---

Comments

Susan — 2005-08-24 06:09:13

Ah, Mr. Weldon’s chair! And what does “borked” mean?

bryan — 2005-08-24 09:02:58

http://borked.urbanup.com/

Susan — 2005-08-26 19:52:22

I love the random pictures….it’s like an unstructured walk thru your experiences and life together for the past three (four?) years.

We just stumbled in a little while ago from an amazing trip to New York. I didn’t post any updates after the first day because, basically, we were always either out or asleep. Soon pictures will be posted with the full narration of our adventures.

Also, the new server is live (whee!). You might notice an improvement in performance (I do, anyway). Let me know if anything seems weird.

So, our year with Servepath (SUCK!) is almost over, and Ali found a great place to colo in Michigan, so we’re going to set ourselves up with a little server there and hopefully things will work out better. It’s actually not all that little–the new box is a 2.8GHz P4 with a gig of RAM and 240GB of space… quite a step up from our current 20GB. I imagine the switch over to the new server will be sometime in the next couple of weeks. Nothing should change for anyone using overt, but there might be a few problems here or there. Just let me know if there is any trouble.

So, I just recently switched my website from postnuke over to WordPress. As part of the process, I wrote a simple PHP script to convert all of the entries from the postnuke site over to WordPress. Although postnuke is a pretty heavy-duty CMS, there might be a few people out there who will make the same switch, so I decided to clean up the script a little and post it on the site for anyone who needs it. You can get it here. I put it under the GPL, so you can probably use it with no worries. If you do use it, send me an email or post a comment or something. I should add that it would be generous to say that I’m a novice at PHP. I’m sure there’s plenty I did wrong writing the script, but it works (for me), and that was enough.

Update 12 August 2005: I should have mentioned that this script was written for Wordpress 1.2, and will require some massaging to work with 1.5. Check the comments for more info.

---

Comments

Kind of a question — 2004-09-30 16:39:35

Could I ask why? I am really curious?

bryan — 2004-09-30 17:32:12

you’re asking why i switched from postnuke to wordpress? or why i wrote the converter?

Mattz — 2005-01-06 05:06:53

I really need this script but it doesn’t do anything. I try to run it under my OS X iBook MySQL server but nothing happens. Any ideas?

bryan — 2005-01-06 10:52:40

Well… it’s a PHP script, not an SQL script, so you should be running it on your webserver. Also, it doesn’t work “out of the box.” You have to change the table names where they are indicated in the comments to the ones that you use.

Wolf — 2005-02-22 18:10:14

No matter what I do I keep getting this when I try to convert:

INSERT INTO wp_categories ( cat_ID, cat_name, category_nicename, category_description ) VALUES ( ‘2’, ‘Linux’, ‘Linux’, ’’ );Fatal error: Duplicate entry ‘2’ for key 1

Any ideas?

Wolf — 2005-02-22 18:23:00

figured my last comment out, but now when I convert - categories go over nicely but the stories seem stuck. I get this repeating message:

Just inserted ID 1

bryan — 2005-02-22 23:04:37

I think it might be that your ID column for stories is not autoincrement? ‘autoincrement’ means that whenever a new record is created, it increases the number by one and uses that for the column value. If it doesn’t do this, the script is going to try to insert a new row that has a primary key that’s identical to another, which is an SQL no-no.

jk — 2005-03-27 20:08:17

Hi there.

What version of postnuke and wordpress is this written for ?

I’m converting a postnuke .750 to a WP 1.5 I’m having trouble with the script it seems to fail to insert the story data but has success inserting the category data.

Thanks in advanced.

J

bryan — 2005-03-28 09:25:51

Yes… this converter was written for WP 1.2, so I’m afraid with the new wordpress version it probably won’t work “out-of-the-box” anymore. still, it shouldn’t be too hard to take a look at the new WP table structure and update it.

jk — 2005-03-28 11:38:17

Bryan- I took the liberty of changing the code “just a bit" I removed these four vars for a quick fix. I hope this helps the other pn converts :-)

Lines:

125 post_lat , 126 post_lon ,

—- and this —–

148 NULL , 149 NULL ,

Michael — 2005-07-06 10:47:22

Hi,

Thank you so much for the script - it is exactly what I was looking for. I ran it with limited success. It seems that it did not import the entire stories, only the lead-ins. I am also going from pn .75 to wp 1.5, and made the adjustment in comment 10.

Take a look. The original pn site is at: www.bullnotbull.com/bull, and the wp site at www.bullnotbull.com/wp.

I’m a relative newbie, so I’m not sure what kind of adjustments to make to import the enitre story parts. Assistance greatly appreciated.

Michael

Michael — 2005-07-06 12:03:54

Still working with it…now its really screwed up. Would you be able to give some hints as to how this thing is supposed to work…I mean, what is going where, and what is supposed to match up with whatelse?

Thanks a million. Michael

bryan — 2005-07-06 13:29:42

Hi Michael…

When I wrote this script, my goal was basically to grab the stories out of the pn tables and insert them with all the fields that WP wanted. I don’t know much about postnuke, wordpress, or php, so chances are that I didn’t do things the best way possible.

The first thing to do is look at your pn tables using a mySQL administration program (phpMyAdmin is my favorite). Figure out what columns you want moved into WordPress, and for each record in postnuke, copy those columns into the corresponding WordPress columns. Where WordPress has columns that don’t exist in pn, you’ll have to insert default or null values. My script is just a simple implementation of this procedure.

Unfortunately, I haven’t touched pn since last July, so I don’t know what might have changed in its table structure since this script was written. I did look at your site, and it seems like whatever column in postnuke stores the body of your stories is not getting copied correctly to the “yourblogprefix_posts” table “post_content” column.

You could add some debug output to the script I posted to make sure the post content is being read correctly. Something like:

printf(“Just read post content %sn”, $myhometext);

right after

$myhometext = mysql_escape_string($myrow[‘pn_hometext’]);

Good luck!

RC — 2005-09-15 15:06:32

THANKS A LOT! You have no idea how much time you saved me. All I did was take the script and deleted the 4 lines like jk said and it worked beautifully the first time!

Anthony — 2006-02-23 00:58:46

Hey, I’ve got a WP 1.5/PHP 5 version of this working if anyone wants it.

Anthony — 2006-02-23 01:03:33

oh, forgot my email address. catch me at spartan.ii [at] mac [dot] com.

George — 2009-08-13 00:24:22

Oh man, how does it work on wp 2.8.4? I would just love your script for he site www.kohtao-community.com. It’ a charity site that urgently needs an update…. Can you help?

bryan — 2009-08-13 08:48:39

Hi George,

I’m sorry, but I wrote this script almost 5 years ago, and wordpress (and postnuke) are a lot more complex than they used to be. I doubt I’ll be able to update it.

George — 2009-08-13 19:10:17

Thanks for looking into it anyway.

bryan — 2009-08-14 15:00:58

George:

I actually just noticed this updated version of my script that someone made and that works on Wordpress 2.5, at least: http://www.thereitis.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/pnconvert_250.txt. Maybe that can help?

Here it is. It’s still not totally done, but close enough that I wanted to transfer all the old posts over. Please let me know if you encounter any errors or explosions or whatever. And yes, I’m going to change the pic up top…

---

Comments

cameron — 2004-07-08 16:50:45

Um…all the links/archives/search/etc on the right hand side are at the bottom of the page (at least in IE6)

i like the blue

bryan — 2004-07-08 17:26:31

damn you IE! i don’t have a windows machine to test it with. But i’ll try to find one.

bryan — 2004-07-08 17:48:09

okay… i borrowed leslie’s school laptop, which runs windows. I’m going to see if i can’t sort things out…

clare — 2004-07-08 18:01:02

IE balows

bryan — 2004-07-08 18:27:23

seems to look tolerable in IE now. Seriously, that browser is a huge security risk and a travesty of web standards. Use something better, safer, smaller, free and open source. Firefox!

cameron — 2004-07-08 19:56:42

done and done

i love the comment box!

leslie — 2004-07-08 20:11:55

Looks great! I love the yellow flowers pic. :)

bryan — 2004-07-08 22:37:48

cam - you tried Firefox? What do you think?

cameron — 2004-07-09 09:03:26

let’s see…i enjoy the tabs….why IE still doesn’t have them is a mystery to me - i always use them in safari on dad’s ibook. oh, and i was really impressed that it would play my online health lectures (which say you MUST use IE to view them and which none of the three different browsers on dad’s ibook could play)

i don’t know. everything seems to be going well. what else should i have noticed about its greatness?

bryan — 2004-07-09 09:20:49

Nothing in particular… I just figured because you were still using IE in this day and age that you must be die-hard or something :) One of my favorite things about firefox is the plugins. There’s the super-cool BugMeNot plugin that automatically gets bogus registration information for those “registration required” websites. There’s adblock that lets you right-click on any image or flash thingy and block it, and (maybe handy for you) there’s even ieview, that lets you right click to view a page in IE when you absolutely have to. I haven’t tried the last one, though, because it’s windows only.

em — 2004-07-11 07:58:46

The new look is fabu!!

I’m working on putting together a reasonable stylesheet for WordPress. Once I do, I’m going to try to get all my content migrated over from postnuke, which has proven to be unwieldy in the end. Hopefully I’ll gain some flexibility and simplicity with the move.

---

Comments

Susan — 2004-07-02 06:27:59

I don't understand any of this.  what does it mean?  Will it make my life better?

bryan — 2004-07-02 10:08:30

it relates to my website. just like leslie and cameron use something called “blogger,” I use something called “postnuke” to do my site. I’m switching from this to something called “WordPress.” And it will change the way you think about the world. Or, at least, it will change the way my web page looks.