e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: ExpressionEngine

  • Welcome to e-Literate 2.0

    At long last, I have managed to move my blog over to WordPress. Many thanks to Sarah Lewis at Blogging Expertise for helping me get my content out of ExpressionEngine, style the site the way I wanted, and make sure that old URLs didn’t break. She was able to head some problems off at the pass that probably would have taken somebody with less WordPress-specific experience days to figure out.

    There are a number of little issues I’m still working out (mostly small post formatting problems that I’m correcting by hand), but everything should work here. Please let me know if you spot any problems. All major URLs, including the RSS feed, should auto-forward, but just in case, you might want to update your RSS reader to the new feed URL, which is http://feeds.feedburner.com/mfeldstein/yyMY.

    In the meantime, I thought I would take the opportunity to point out a few features of the new blog that you might find useful:

    (more…)

  • More on Evolving the Wikipedia Prior Art Page

    Update: How annoying. Even with the URL escaped in my post and the emoticon module turned off in ExpressionEngine, the software insists on rendering the key combination of a colon followed by a P in the URL as a smiley face. I really must find somebody who can help me migrate to WordPress….

    Thanks to the help of experienced Wikipedians, we have some helpful critiques of the History of Virtual Learning Environments page. You can see them on the peer review page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:
    Peer_review/History_of_virtual_learning_environments    ) and the discussion page for the article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
    Talk:History_of_virtual_learning_environments    ). Sorry these aren’t active hyperlinks. For some reason, the colons in the URLs appear to be confusing ExpressionEngine so it renders the hyperlinks funny.

    Please lend a hand by helping to implement the suggested edits.

  • Not Dead Yet (and Other News)

    I know I’ve been rather quiet lately. I’m working on a couple of new projects that I can’t talk about yet but that I should be able to talk about soon (one within a couple of weeks and another within a couple of months). Between these extra-curriculars, some articles I’m writing, and an impending move to a beautiful house in the Berkshires, I’ve been falling behind on the blog posting thing. I will probably continue to be sporadic through the end of August.

    In the meantime, the one thing I can talk about now is my research into moving to WordPress. I’ve wanted to make the move for quite some time. ExressionEngine is a fine platform, but if you’re just looking for blogging and not so much for a CMS, then you just can’t beat WordPress for its maturity and pace of continuing development. The trouble has been that it would have cost me too much money to migrate, since I don’t have the skills to do my own programming and page design.

    Luckily, there’s some good news for me:

    • While there still isn’t a built-in ExpressionEngine import tool, there are a few utilities floating around that will get me most of the way there.
    • Between new themes, new plugins, and new widgets, I’ve been able to get a test WordPress installation to do about 90% of the things that my current setup can do (and a bunch of things it can’t do) with no programming.
    • There are tons of cheap WordPress hosting options that work even for non-techies like me–particularly since the amazing Fantastico installer that many ISPs now provide includes a WordPress installer.

    So, while it will still probably cost me some money to make the migration (particularly if I want to get some help to make sure all current EE links get auto-forwarded to their new WordPress URLs), it’s looking increasingly affordable.

    I’ll keep you posted.

  • e-Literate is Currently a Little Messed Up for IE Users

    Just wanted to let you know that I am aware that the site is not displaying properly for Internet Explorer users at the moment. (The sidebar is pushed to the bottom of the page.) This might have happened when I upgraded to ExpressionEngine 1.4, but I’m not sure. Not being terribly cross-browser-savvy myself, I have bribed one of my colleagues at work into helping me figure out what is wrong. (The page seems to display just fine in both Firefox and Safari.) We’re working on it. In the meantime, the sidebar is still functional for IE users; you just have to scroll down to see it.

    Sorry.

  • Why Bloglines Sucks

    OK, after getting some helpful comments on my earlier post, mostly by a pMachines programmer (along with a somewhat more passive aggressive but at least marginally helpful post from somebody at Bloglines), I think I’m beginning to understand the problem. The short version is that there is something wrong with my blog feed but the Bloglines crawler and customer service reps both handle the situation very poorly.

    Bear with me on this, because it taxes the limits of my technical competence…. (more…)