*holds my head* stayed up late poking at a program to help me convert my website from the ancient version to the most recent one. hard to believe it's been a few years already and the developer has made a lot of changes. which leaves me with some 30-something projects to convert and each one has a chunk in the beginning of the file which contains some information that needs to be gotten out and poked into a new format. i have most of it working already which isn't bad because if it does work it will save me having to edit each of those by hand so much. i may have to do some fine tweeking afterwards and a few of them need updating, but just to get the website on the more recent version.
one thing about such a program is that once it works well enough i can post a link to it for others to use who might find themselves in a similar spot in the future and it can be adapted for other parts of the website if needed. i'm already pondering dealing with the posts, but since most of them are old information anyways i may just skip that part for now. still it is a bit of fun to play computer games like this to solve a problem. i like puzzles of this sort and this is a minor example of what can be done easily. if i wanted to get a lot more complete and less hacky i could come up with a complete formal description of the languages and headers in both the old and new formats and then write transformation patterns in yet a third language but that's like taking a shotgun where a butterknife will do, but the result is much more satisfying when it is done. that's the difference between being paid to do something and just whacking at it with a shovel.
as it turned out the first part is done and working so the 30 something projects are done so i went on to the posts (which i only have about 14 to do) and have that mostly working already too. at this rate i may be able to have this done tomorrow or so depending upon how much i get sidetracked by other things... yay!
