| What's up?This page gives a short account of my experiences in converting 
              the weblog Zwavelaars 
              from Greymatter 
              (GM) to Nucleus. 
             Why changing from Nucleus to GM?Well, internally, GM is a mess. Also, with the growing number of 
              messages on Zwavelaars, the rebuild-time kept growing as 
              well. Also, I didn't like the way a message was stored in two seperate 
              files. I was looking for a new weblog-tool written in PHP and using 
              MySQL for storing the data. Pivot 
              is based on PHP, looks good, but uses files for storing the messages. 
              Nucleus 
              fills all my wishes and version 1.1 doesn't have the rough edges 
              of earlier 0.9x version.  How did I do the conversion?Nothing special; First I tried Nucleus under a seperate account 
              and then I did the installation procedure under my "production" 
              account. After that, the supplied conversion tool from GM to Nucleus 
              did a splendid job. No problems, piece of cake. Just a few loose ends...After using Nucleus for about a month, I noticed in my Nedstat-statistics 
              that a lot of people found my weblog through the "old" 
              GM-links. E.g. Google gives a link to an old message (e.g. 
              http://zwavel.com/~zwavelaars/00000432.php) or an old archive 
              (like http://zwavel.com/~zwavelaars/archive-092001.php). 
              To clean the old GM-stuff as much as possible, I wanted to change 
              the old GM-files in way they redirected the user to the new Nucleus-information. 
              I came up with the following solution: Fill the old "000xxx.php" files with a piece of javascript 
              which makes the appropriate Nucleus-call. Something like http://zwavel.com/~zwavelaars/index.php?itemid=yyy. 
              In my case, GM message "xxx", was the same as Nucleus 
              itemid "xxx+121". With the following Unix 
              shell-script I have converted the GM-files. This was run under Linux; 
              Change "bash" to "ksh" on other Unix systems.  
              #!/bin/bash for php in 0*.phpdo
  
                numid=$(basename $php .php)num=$(expr "$numid" : '[^1-9]*\([1-9][0-9]*\)$')
 numok=$(expr $num + 121)
 echo "numid=$numid, num=$num, $numok"
 
 cat <<END >$php<html>
 <head>
 <title>Redirection</title>
 </head>
 <body>
 <script language="javascript">
 location="http://zwavel.com/~zwavelaars/index.php?itemid=${numok}"
 </script>
 </body>
 </html>
 END done
 The GM archives were named "archive-mmyyyy.php" 
              which should redirect to "http://zwavel.com/~zwavelaars/index.php?archive=yyyy-mm&blogid=2" 
              (blogid=2 is the blogid of my "production version" of 
              Zwavelaars. To change these files I used the following script:  
              #!/bin/bash for php in archive-*.phpdo
 
  
                file=$(basename $php .php)odat=$(expr "$file" : 'archive-\([0-9]*\)$')
 y=$(expr "$odat" : '.*\(....\)$')
 m=$(expr "$odat" : '\(..\)....$')
 
 cat <<END >$php<html>
 <head>
 <title>Redirection</title>
 </head>
 <body>
 <script language="javascript">
 location="http://zwavel.com/~zwavelaars/index.php?archive=${y}-${m}&blogid=2"
 </script>
 </body>
 </html>
 END done
  After this, I removed all .cgi-files and, naturally, all GM-files 
              and Perl-scripts. All in all, I converted to Nucleus without any real problems. If 
              you have any questions, feel free to send me an email.   |