David Hayes

As you’ve probably noticed (or not since I always read blogs via rss and you probably do too) I recently stuffed up our blog, now this isn’t that uncommon (I like to fiddle with things and often end up breaking them) however this time I really messed something up and couldn’t persuade pebble to work. Now mainly this is because Tomcat, JSP and me are things that rarely mix so I decided it was time to switch to a blog platform I had half a clue how to support (and change for that matter).

Anyway we’ve switched to WordPress which was remarkably easy to install and configure, finding a nice theme was probably the hardest part (I’m still fiddling with it but it’s pretty close). It actually feels slower than Pebble which is a testament to Simon’s coding prowess since Tomcat isn’t exactly a lightweight application. I’m hoping the wp-cache plugin will mitigate this somewhat.

There are certainly a few broken links around (missing images mainly) and probably some duff deep links floating about on the web (mod_rewrite to the rescue!), I’ve found a few already and redirected the rss feeds to their new location. I need to decide what to do about the root rss feed since WordPress doesn’t handle multiple blogs as nicely as Pebble. I might knock up a snippet of PHP to amalgamate the three rss feeds into one if I get time. I  also need to replace the old Pebble frontpage with something sensible.

Migrating content was pretty simple, Wordpress has an extended version of RSS which it will import and Pebble helpfully stores everything in XML so I knocked up a quick C# app to convert all my Pebble entries into Wordpress ones. I’ve attached the code so you can take a look. It’s pretty simple but may come in handy for someone else one day. It’s only tested on my data so it may not work well for everybody!

Pebble XML to Wordpress RSS

/Technology /Technology