Fax and Moulder

<b>In which our Hero finds himself discovering that time and tag sort for no one</b>

Things got flatter, while you’ve been gone, Gentle Reader. I remain me, but the balance has shifted. Self-employment chews at my boundaries I think. Been head down somewhat at work. Also seem to be unintentionally speed-sketching polar bears. Speed does not improve my already limited abilities.

I’m trying to figure out how to write here still. I’m trying to figure out how to reconnect with the old entries and it’s not going well. They were blue and grey, for years and years, and now they are the wrong colour and a strange font. Which is an old man ranting about the old days, but what else do you rant about when you’ve got old days at hand?

A bigger problem, that I’m going to chew through here, before submitting:

I went to a chapter that had pictures, with the idea of seeing if I remembered correctly that I’d replaced a few images, back before things went down. And what I’m finding is that the pictures are missing. The non-text tags don’t seem to have survived the conversion process. Which means that I’ve got to go through all my entries, find where there were pictures, and replace them, because the were part of the entry even if they weren’t part of the text.

I was not the most prolific of the old community but I’ve got two thousand nine hundred and thirty entries. That’s a lot of sifting.

Actually I’ve just tested, and while I can use italics tags, this editor won’t let me put an img tag in. Which means that even if I knew exactly where the tags go, I have to click and paste and click again. Aside from just the business of fixing, I have to say, this is a show stopper because I mostly don’t write in this editor, because the most reliable lesson of the web has always been the unreliability of it.

Alternatively, it means that my img tags could be actually imported and in the entry text, just not visible.

—

I went to the last entry, which mentions a link to another post. An internal Opendiary link. On the old site. It hasn’t been converted to reference the new URL. More sifting and clean up.

—

It occurred to me that there might be an image right near the beginning. So I hit the history, went back to the 1998 December listing, and found my very first entry, that line in the sand. And hit next and… the next entry is not the next entry. I know this because i would not have started with a part ii. Clicking further, another part ii. from a different set of entries, back in the days when entries were very limited in size.

My diary is not in order. It seems to be okay so long as the dates are different, but same day entries have not worked out so well as one would hope in diary. (The plus side is that in a book it could be worth more. Or the basis for a recall. Hmm)

Turns out the problem is visible right at the end of my diary, as much as at the beginning. When we got the word that OD was closing, I wrote a goodbye, and then hitting refresh got boring and I realized I had come so close to three thousand entries that i started posting stupid little things. And counting down as I did it:

My recent entries page lists the countdown as follows:

• 80 bottles of beer
• 81 bottles of beer on the wall
• Like a Headless Diary-Entry-Posting chicken (would have been 79, based on contents)
• 74 Getting Dark, Too Dark to See
• 72 Iss Chess Mah Mum
• Nineteen 73
• 75 Unclever Ideas
• Seventeen 76

It’s interesting to try to speculate. Everything could have gone in at midnight, which would leave the system to try to generate order with no distinguishing key. Or it could be fine in the actual database inserts, and just grouped however by the database cache.

But I can’t fix that myself. Ideally, just reimport the diary back up, but this time, use the entry number or the in-day row number as a minutes/seconds offset, to force chronology where it’s needed. But I don’t have the keys to the database. So now how to do that? Wipe and reimport? what about the new entries that are not part of the archive? Are these beta entries going to go away?

It’s all part of the beta business and no doubt will be addressed at some point. But I’m feeling a little daunted.

Things to note for support:

• img tags don’t appear to have been imported within entries
• internal references to other entries have not been updated. I can do the fixes, but I need a good search. need to test that one.
• cutting and pasting into a list, at the end of a little bit of text, makes the viewport jump. I’d paste at the then-bottom of entry, and I’d suddenly be seeing my cover image.
• diary order is wrong.

Sleepy now. I’ll put those in tomorrow. Goodnight, Gentle Reader.