03.11.04
Four More Years
No I’m not talking politics! I’ve added entries from my old Journaling system. Let’s see… I stopped using it in 2000, so now, 4 years later I’ve finally imported them into this system.
Neither my script nor this system (GreyMatter) have import or export tools, so it was mostly manual. The biggest stumbling block was the lack of documentation of the GreyMatter files (though they’re all very easy to access Perl scripts). However when I got pointed to foshdawg.net/gm/dev/ via the ongoing greymatterforums.com it started to be something that I could accomplish.
GM has a weird background. It was created by a guy who wanted it for a photoblog, but then he dropped it after some nasty personal stuff. It was already in pretty wide use, so instead of migrating away from the abandoned ware, a bunch of people picked it up and continued working on it.
This week I moved the latest ‘official’ release, which mostly added security features. It was released last October, so it seemed to have been pretty well accepted by the users without any big issues.
So after making that updgrade (which consisted of uploading 5 .pl files.) I decided to dive into getting the old journal entries in the system. First I had to figure out how many old entries I had, so that I could renumber the ‘new’ entries. Tuned out I had 389 old entries and it was easer to simply add 11 blank entries and then add 400 to the serial numbers.
Finally I combined all of my old entries into a single master archive (only about 500k) and then I used BBEdit to strip out the extra HTML and BBEdit’s RegEx search and replace to get all of my data in order.
My saving grace was that I had added a time/date stamp that was at the start of each entry and I never varied it the three years that I was using the system. That allowed me to keep the all of the entries in order and organized.
The last step was splitting the master archive into each individual entry file. I used an old Classic app called TextSplitter 2.2.1 that Dejal Systems released for free now that it’s ‘old tech’. It had a few hang ups and I had to split the Master Archive in half in order to get it all the way through.
End result? My archive page is now twice as long and the entries from 1998 to 2000 need to be edited to look somewhat decent. Over time I guess.