Adventures in Entrecard Land
I decided to give a try to this SezWho thing, Entrecard’s latest innovation. After registering, I duly went to the download page only to find a few plug-ins, naturally for the popular blogging scripts only. Probably being the only person using an obscure yet simple script, I decided to download the developer’s edition, hoping I could manage to make it work by editing a few files (One thing Slackware teaches you is you learn to edit all sorts of configuration files without being a programmer. I even managed to configure a working sendmail once, go figure. That incident did not repeat, though).
I skimmed through the code for a few hours with a 100% Zen attitude (vodka-martini also helped). Apparently comments had to be stored in database tables (my understanding, I could be wrong) and my script was just appending them to the post in pure text. Now that I knew the problem, I could solve it, could I not? There was a minor glitch, though: not only I did not write a single line of code in my life including the notorious Hello World!, I had zero knowledge of MySql. The solution? Easy! I immediately downloaded one of Juliet’s (in order not to offend anyone) Teach Yourself MySql in 10 Minutes type of books, the dummy’s edition.
Well, after 3 hours and reading some 50 plus pages, one fact was certain: either it was impossible to learn MySql in 10 minutes or I was dumber than an average dummy (I tend to believe the former, a subjective view of course). Anyway, it was apparent that I could not do it.
Not wanting to stay behind and miss the huge potential of this Web 2.0 phenomenon, I decided to switch to a different blogging platform and Wordpress seemed to be a logical choice.
I certainly did not go the downloads page (surprise) but started a search for an XHTML 1.0 strict template. For the trolls out there, it has got nothing to do with the strict/transitional conflict, nor with Emacs/vi holy war (I will tell you some other time). I found one, simple, not too taxing on the eyes, downloaded wordpress, upgraded Mysql, Php, Apache on the laptop and made a local installation. After verifying the template is OK, my second problem slowly surfaced: I had no way of importing my existing posts to Wordpress!
Oh, well! At least, I had back-ups locally, and uploading them one by one would only be time consuming. I would only wait for the right time, when there were few visitors and Friday night seemed ideal as most normal people would go out and have fun, they would not sit staring at their computer screens.
Man, was I wrong! The site was taking hits constantly. Not knowing if I should be pissed off or glad, I waited. Just when the number of visitors decreased to an acceptable level (that is less than handful per hour, this is not Slashdot or something), I uploaded Wordpress, started with post 1.
While I was writing the second post, Blog Catalog sent me an e-mail, telling me my site looked spammy. They incidentally decided to check the site at the worst possible time. Not that I care, good riddance for them. I quickly copied all the posts in a couple of hours, using the HTML editor of course. I still do not have an idea what that Tiny-something does. Uploading the pictures proved easy. After Wordpress created a folder for them, I ftp’ed all the pictures like in good old days.
Finally I was ready for Sezwho. I grabbed the plug-in, activated it, and my template was screwed up! A big 80×80 picture with a big head was skewing the titles. Slightly displeased, I tried to re-size the picture. No luck! And I deactivated the plug-in, despite I noticed a few blogs with reasonably sized pictures. I demand an 15×15 picture as a retribution! I will have a look at it on Sunday. 
I have no idea if Sezwho will be able track your comments this way, I think it should, but if you like to comment, I am all yours (SezMe).
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