Well, as of this morning, I’m done moving Wordpress to the new host. I thought I was done last night, but I’d forgotten to properly update the apache configuration. Oops.

Looks like things are working fine now.

I’ve switched my blog over to WordPress.

Quite frankly, it was a breeze. I had to some hassles with importing old posts from an RSS feed, but having so few old posts, I gave up on that and just took about 20 minutes of my time to get them into WordPress.

Proper Flash video posting is still wanting. For now, I just put in the raw HTML, but this generates feeds with <object> tags in them, which is not technically legal, and browser-based feed readers like Bloglines will ignore it. Eventually I’ll get around to writing my own plugin for posting FLV videos. Yes, I tried practically all of the existing WordPress plugins for posting Flash video. The problems with them generally come down to either: they’re entirely oriented around posting videos hosted on well-known sites, or they’re too inflexible to have the FLV and SWF off on another host — they assume it’s all on the same host as the WordPress site.

As far as the optional bits go:

• I’m using the Livetr Theme, because it is fairly pleasant — two column, easy on the eyes, doesn’t assume that all web browsers are obscenely wide. I’ll replace it when I create something better.
• I’m using reCaptcha, because it’s a neat idea.
• I’m using wp-cache, because my server is slow.

Oh, better check again that my MySQL database dump script is working.

[Note: this is the last (i.e. most recent) of my posts imported from pyBlosxom, and it makes possibly-confusing) reference to that, not Wordpress.]

I’d already figured out how to get it into Flash video format. There are sufficient opensource encoders for this, such as FFmpeg, but since I have the giant box of Adobe fun I used their Flash Video Encoder Of course, I ended up running it one more time today after learning that iMovie didn’t do what I want and scaled my movie to a smaller size because I didn’t pay close attention while using it to edit the original video slightly.

I decided to host the actual video on Amazon S3. I determined that if my videos got really popular and went over my colo server’s bandwidth allocation, I’d be paying five times as much for bandwidth than I am paying for it via S3.

I fought with s3sync for a while. I want to get it working eventually so I can script this process better, but I had bizarre problems, like it creating the object, but it being zero bytes in size. So, I went looking for something relatively easy to use for OS X, and I found

S3 Browser. It works great, though it does need manual input of the correct MIME type sometimes.

Rather than bother with putting together my own player, I just used FlowPlayer, because it’s open source and doesn’t seem very annoying.

I uploaded the player .swf file, the .flv video file, and a .jpg as preview image for the movie to a bucket I’d created in S3. It’s important to have the Flash and the data it loads on the same server if you want to avoid Flash crossdomain security issues.

I grabbed some appropiate HTML for invoking the player and changed some of the configuration variables. Don’t forget that part about the controller height.

Finally I figured out how to put raw HTML into reStructuredText so I could put it in my blog. The documented way works, but I wasn’t taking it literally enough and had no end of trouble before I figured out to leave an empty line between the directive and the indented block

Next time I’ll write a shell script or two to do all of this. :) And I’ll figure out how to make it show up usefully in RSS feeds.

[Note: This post was imported from my old blog]

I wanted to finally have a public blog, and for certain reasons, I wanted something that just took a tree of text files and rendered them into a blog. I also think reStructuredText is pretty neat. At the very least, it’s less painful than writing HTML. So, I’ve installed PyBlosxom and I have it set to render everything into static HTML files (why bother with the performance and security implications of anything else?)

Also, in keeping with simplicity, there is no comment system set up on this blog. I see that there are many who think that “a blog without comments is not a blog” but, I would point them to some popular and old blogs like Boing Boing or robot wisdom. I don’t have much need for other people’s prescriptions on how to use technology. Also, comment spam is a waste of my time.

You can email me, and I plan to either periodically publish emails sent to the address listed on the bottom of the page in one big post, or perhaps I’ll update relevant posts with information as they come in. I’m not sure. I like the periodic letters-to-the-editor approach.

I will probably be writing about a lot of computer geek stuff, though it won’t be exclusively limited to that — this blog will be whatever I feel like writing a reasonable-sized post about.

I plan to turn this into some kind of nice content-seperate-from-presentation two-column layout using CSS any day now.

[Ha, and then I installed WordPress several months later.]