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Hey Look, I Have A Website Again

Photo courtesy of Roven Images, via Pexels.com

On December 7, 2018 I got so angry with the Drupal CMS upgrade path from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 that I basically set my website on fire and walked away. It led to one of my more epic rants on Twitter, which I’ve screencapped and included below for posterity:

And with that I did what I said I would: I started migrating 3,401 Drupal nodes — by hand — over to WordPress.

Most of the migration went surprisingly quickly. I was able to get everything but the Help Desk archives over into the new site in a few months. The Help Desk archives themselves, though… well. I finished doing the last comic this morning.

On 24 January, 2021, at something just shy of 5AM EST, I migrated A-I-A-I-O over to WordPress. And with that, all of my archives are now in WordPress, and I can move on with, you know, actually using my website to publish content.

I still miss Drupal when it comes to day-to-day use. I’m not knocking WordPress — it works very well, and the upgrade path between version is SO MUCH BETTER than Drupal’s that I don’t know how to compare the two without resorting to mockery and scorn — but Drupal’s taxonomy management is better (and I leaned on it a lot) and I’ve yet to find anything in the WordPress sphere that does what the Views module did (there have been attempts to emulate it but they didn’t integrate well). But at the end of the day I figured out how to get WordPress to do 99% of what I was able to do with Drupal, and I’m happy with that.

Also, I’m really not a great site designer when it comes to “making things pretty” and the WordPress templates I’ve played with take care of most of that for me.

So here I am, at the other end of a two year process of migrating MORE THAN TWENTY YEARS OF INTERNET CONTENT BY HAND, and I am powerfully glad that part’s over with.

Now… I need to finish writing Curveball Issue 36. And then I need to return to writing everything else.

And who knows? Maybe a webcomic or two sprinkled in for flavor…

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16 comments

Liam Grant 24 January 2021 at 3:33 PM

Congrats!!

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notStanley 25 January 2021 at 2:59 PM

And I kept you in my daily folder of links to check during lunch all this time! Looking forward to more content from you.

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ysth 25 January 2021 at 11:44 PM

He’s still stuck in that chair, you know.

Did you hear Drupal decided breaking compatibility in new versions was dumb and they hope to not do that anymore? 🙂

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C. B. Wright 25 January 2021 at 11:49 PM

Poor Jake. 😀

I did hear that about Drupal! I hope they follow through on that hope, though obviously it’s too late at this point to do me any good, heh.

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ysth 26 January 2021 at 12:02 AM

There was a nanowrimo you posted a few years ago that I hope you pick up again someday (post cb/rake/tpb), something about a death and a closed investigation and lots of papers. But I can’t seem to find it.

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ysth 26 January 2021 at 12:06 AM

Too late? Cue Oracle buying Automattic

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C. B. Wright 26 January 2021 at 12:36 AM

By “too late” I mean “too late for me to upgrade from Drupal to Drupal.” If I ever return to the fold I will be upgrading from WordPress to Drupal, since everything is over here now.

If Oracle buys Automattic, well, that would be typical.

(The nanowrimo you’re thinking of is called Horeb’s Shadow, and it’s on my list of things to return to.)

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Cat 26 January 2021 at 2:43 PM

I check in once a week. I’ve been watching the Help Desk pane move forward with interest. Congratulations on finishing the move!

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C. B. Wright 26 January 2021 at 2:43 PM

Thank you, Cat!

…and of course now I’ve gone ahead and broken something else on my site… 😀

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Tony Tilley 17 February 2021 at 2:24 PM

Are you going to continue comics like Help Desk or Kernel Panic?

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C. B. Wright 17 February 2021 at 4:15 PM

I have a few more stories in Help Desk, maybe. I’m sort of in the middle of a Kernel Panic storyline. I’d like to finish that. And I still want to continue PCTown.

It appears I have to finish Curveball Issue 36 before I can do anything else, though. It’s eating up a lot of brain cycles…

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Leo Rochael 19 February 2021 at 8:53 AM

Me, I was hoping for some more points between the current chapter of The Points Between and the end of the story.

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C. B. Wright 19 February 2021 at 9:33 AM

There’s definitely more TPB coming. It’s in the same position everything else is. Issue 36 has been such a logjam I can’t seem to focus on anything else creative until I get it finished. I’m getting closer, though. Much, much closer…

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Stillwaters 27 April 2021 at 9:53 AM

I’ve been following Curveball. I can’t say that I’ve been checking the site every day, but I’m excited the story will continue. One of my favorite superhero web novels. Thank you for all your hard work!

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C. B. Wright 28 April 2021 at 10:31 AM

Thank you! I’m making progress! It’s painful, but I’m making it!

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onlineexampanda 18 August 2022 at 3:41 AM

Thanks for sharing this article.

Reply

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