Sometimes I amaze myself.

I decided yesterday that it was time once and for all to move the old blogs into the new blog system. I haven’t done this yet as it simply isn’t as easy as it may sound. The two systems use a completely different database structure and the new one is much more complex with a more robust security built in.

But in the end a database is a database and moving data from one to another is - no matter how complex - a matter of properly worded SQL commands. So, I wrote up some pseudo-code that described what I thought would have to happen to make it all work. I then started writing actual code that could accomplish this.

I’m only about 20% done with the blog-conversion code, but so far the code looks good and I’m confident it will work. I hope to have the conversion code complete by the end of the week. Once that’s done I’ll have to do a serious backup of the site before I risk running the code.

If all goes well all blogs will be within the same database system by the start of next week, and this is a good thing for several reasons. Firstly I want to add some new blog features such as TrackBack and an RSS feed for The Triad. It will also allow me to grant you, the DavidMeade.com users, some new abilities (such as editing your comments, or creating a “Favorites” list of blogs). It will allow me to remove several pages and several databases that simply wont be needed anymore. Also I’d like to be able to promote old blogs in the new system to give them a 2nd airing.

Anyway once all this is done, I plan to do some upgrades to the user system. Sometime in the near future I also need to see if I can fix the photo galleries … but that actually will indeed be quite difficult.