Well. It’s hot. What can I say. I’ve spent the entire day floating from cafe to cafe because I couldn’t stand being inside my air-conditionless apartment. (I really dug Influx Cafe, and they even have free wi-fi!) After that I even headed over to Fry’s (after almost getting into an accident after a guy popped a tire on the freeway and nearly rammed me as he headed to the shoulder) and contemplated buying a portable air-conditioner. But seeing as how I don’t have $399, I ended up leaving empty-handed.

Instead, I am sitting in front of my electric fan and chugging ice-cold bottles of water.

Yes.

So it looks like I successfully imported my Wordpress entries into MT by importing the WXR file. Which led me to another blogxistential dilemma: categories or tags?

Because of my experience with Blosxom, which, due to limitations of the file system, only allows you to file a post in a single category (unless you apply some perl hackery to get it to honor symlinks without double-posting), I started off blogging on Wordpress in much the same manner. But after growing accustomed to using del.icio.us for bookmarking, and after revelling in the near-absolute anarchy of folksonomies, I started getting a little crazy with how I categorized my blog posts, sometimes stuffing them in four, five, or more categories which I probably would never use again. Tags were clearly more appropriate for this, but Wordpress still doesn’t have them as of version 2.2.

Both Typo and Mephisto (and Movable Type) let you use both categories and tags.

While in Ruby-on-Rails-land, I found the notion of using both overkill, and just used tags. I mean, it seemed like too much work to categorize and tag. But now that I’ve re-imported my Wordpress posts, I have to figure out what to do with all the categories again.

What I need is a painless way to change categories to tags. Actually, all I probably have to do is munge the WXR import code and change mt_category to mt_tag or something like that. But I don’t want to have to delete all the imported posts then re-import them. And besides, apparently Dreamhost is now having DNS woes. I actually only have one domain registered via Dreamhost, but unfortunately it’s (1) the domain that gets the most traffic (thanks to my Alibata/Bayinbayin site and the transliterator—you’ll probably have to pull it up on Google’s cache for now) and (2) the domain that I’ve been storing images on for blog posts. So that means that if I want images in my old posts, I’m going to have to find them and re-import them into MT. Fabulous. (Which leads me to wonder, are there any blog-engine-independent asset manager web apps out there?)

The upshot of all of this is that I’m probably going to just have to manually run through the 400+ blog entries I’ve written since February 2006 (What is wrong with me? I need to make more friends whom I can talk to, instead of always blogging about my woes.) Guaranteed fun times.

Since my old Blosxom blog is actually still hosted on the domain that is currently inaccessible, I wonder if I should try to import those entries into MT as well? (While the domain is inaccessible, I can still get to the server, so I could theoretically copy them over to another domain that’s registered elsewhere.) Madness.