Finished moving

I've finished tweaking the theme, archiving the old site, and installing all sorts of administrative goodies (mint) in order to get things underway. My old blog has been relocated although I was not able to get the old posts imported successfully.

Way back when I first started blogging, WordPress, TypePad and all these other fun publishing systems didn't exist. It was LiveJournal or bust. Being that I had just learned PHP, I wrote my own blog in PHP with a fairly simple backend using XML files for storage.

Over the years, I've iterated through a number of different handbuilt blog systems built in PHP, Python, and Bash. Sadly, I'm not able to keep up with all of the latest Web 2.0 trends anymore. On the bright side, things have progressed a bit since LiveJournal, and I was able to get WordPress running with very little trouble.

Now, back to the point of the story... Years ago when I wrote that first XML based blog, I didn't know much about proper data storage and showed no regard for date and time formatting. I've been able to adapt every blog I've had since then to be able to work with that ugly format, but WordPress just wasn't able to grok it.

In theory, I could write a script to convert all of the timestamps to a common format and output to a more standard convention, but I didn't keep with the same formatting rules through the different blog systems so some posts have different formats than others. I've decided that its best to just leave those posts behind in a world of non-compliant data entry and am moving toward a standards based world.

So, that's the long winded reason you don't see an archive of three years of posts behind this one. I hope to make up for it by adding lots of interesting and useful content here.

To kick off this new blog, I've been working on an implementation of Conway's Game of Life in ASCII using Python. The code isn't quite complete yet, but I plan to eventually add it to my growing collection of telnet servers that are available to the world.