Urban Adventures & More

Saving your movable type permalinks when moving to Wordpress is as easy today as it was in 2004; just convert the underscores to dashes, make sure your permalink structure matches otherwise, and you’re done!

In testing this out, I have found great reverence for wordpress. If you request a page, and the URL isn’t quite right, it will actually figure it out and deliver the best guess. For example, on my old site, the following was a link:

www.dreich.info/blog/archives/2008/12/highbridge_jume.html

This is automatically redirected to:

www.dreich.info/2008/12/highbridge-jume

…which isn’t actually a page on my new site. Instead, wordpress corrects it to:

www.dreich.info/2008/12/highbridge-jumel-house-city-college-bike-ride/

and you get the right page! (Really: try googling jumel dreich.info and note what google gives as the link, and what it actually is. This will probably go away soon when google recrawls the site.)

In the course of futzing with the mod_rewrite, I found out why none of my rewrites ever work: you can’t have a leading slash on the URI. It isn’t there; your rule will never match anything.

I put a link to my NYC Facade blog on Facebook (now that I have enough posts to feel like it’s not an embarassment). I got this reply from a friend of mine from college:

Hope you don’t mind that I sent the artists on my game team your link. They’re plugging away at creating “Empire City”. One of them asked that you take some straight-on shots next time for easier texture reference .

Tee hee, my work is helping a video game!

Also, after sampling about 4 RSS feed importers, I seem to have one that is working (miraculously, because I thought I deleted all of them just as quickly!). Having now dealt with facebook’s app interface, I can say I really hate it. You can’t tell whose site you’re on; everything comes with an ominous warning that they are going to look at all your private data; you can’t find anything once it’s installed; and you can’t seem to uninstall anything, either.

I just had my first real experience with wordpress’s PHP functions. I’ll say right now that I don’t like their documentation. The reason is, let’s say you are looking at the documentation on the get_posts function, as I was. The examples there mention lots of other functions and properties in their examples, such as “$post->ID”. However, there is no link readily available to find out the other properties of “$post”! My best guess was to google suggestive names (like nice_name), which gets you to the page that describes this object (I can’t even find it now!).

But that gripe wasn’t my point. I wanted to point out some new features on my NYC Facade blog: more dynamic pages. The most expedient way of creating, say, lists of links to begin with was to simply use a sidebar widget. But that’s stupid, because I want people to use the sidebar for navigating within the site; you’ll only hit a link once, but you’ll have to stare at it for every page you visit!

So as you can now see, I created pages that show you Newest, Complete List, and Links. I did each of these by assigning to a blank page a Wordpress Template that I created in the Theme Editor (is there any way to create a new template through the web inteface without manually creating a file in the theme directory first?). Then I went crazy with the PHP functions by modifying the theme files I already had and also by looking into plugin source. I can share it with you if you’re curious, although it’s really easy stuff.

One thing I’d still like to do is add tags to the Complete List, but I can’t seem to make that work (it’s not possible that the “get tag” functions only work in The Loop, is it?)

I took a bike ride up to Inwood and ultimately Riverdale yesterday in search of the mysterious path past the George Washington Bridge. I was quite happy with what I found.

Continue reading…

Movable type wasn’t doing it for me any more. Plus, dreamhost doesn’t auto-install them, and, let’s face it, I don’t really want to devote the time to maintaining software.

This page was helpful in making a page called “Blog” that has all the posts on it. It’s a little sparse on the explanation, but you’re a smart kid.

I created a new photo blog on this site. As I write there, the “blog serves to document and organize my interest in building exteriors.” Right now I have 15 photos up there; a new batch will arrive as soon as my memory card reader arrives. (Well, the timing may vary depending on whether I have schoolwork to do.)

About a month ago, I followed a walking tour in the financial district from the “Essential New York” book. Following are some pictures. I had lots of fun with panoramas. I also built on my lesson from last time; when taking pictures for a panorama, you have to make sure to fill up the corners or the visible rectangular part will be very small. On the other hand, once you do that you get greedy and want the corners to be very full, and, well, before you know it you wish you had taken a full 360 degree picture and a full 90 degrees up. Continue reading…