(Or Don Quixote Rides Again)
N.B. As I wrote this piece, I realized I was also deep in thought about being a witness and participant in the larger digital revolution. This post covers the mechanics and the pain of the blog migration. My next post will cover memories of the digital revolution.
It Hurts So Good
The writer and acerbic critic, Dorothy Parker, once wryly observed
If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of [Strunk and White’s] The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.
She was undoubtedly right about The Elements of Style. Its trenchant writing directives
- Make the paragraph the unit of composition
- Omit needless words
- Revise and rewrite
have helped many an aspiring writer, including this one, turn turgid and meandering prose into crisp and lucid messages. After nearly forty years and many moves, I still have my well-used copy, and I recommended it to many a graduate student after reading and commenting on their thesis drafts.
As for writing happiness, a finely crafted sentence, paragraph, page, or article is its own reward, however tortured its creation. Ah, but the art of writing is a story for another day. (See My Balm in Gilead and Eudora, You Got the Love?)
Today’s rumination is on the mechanics – and pain – of digital content presentation, prompted by the migration of this blog from Typepad to WordPress.
(Parenthetically, Strunk and White would abhor my use of the word “rumination” when the word “thought” would do nicely. They would likely take umbrage at “abhor” and “umbrage” as well.)
My quixotic quest awaits. Let’s get to it.
What You See Is Not What You Get
Breathes there a user of Microsoft Word anywhere on the planet who has not darkened the air with imprecations and maledicta when a seemingly innocuous attempt to move a table or figure even a mere Planck length, triggered a mass figure and table migration to a single shared location? Save for the grace of “undo,” that invisible and terrifying force of nature would have defiled and destroyed countless documents. It’s no laughing matter, particularly for large documents being prepared under deadline.
Lest you science and engineering LaTeX aficionados sneer and snicker at the Microsoft proletariat, let me remind you of the dreaded “overfull \hbox” message. It’s a harbinger of doom, captured in this O’Reilly book parody, where figures and the text may not fit in the space you either hoped or imagined. These may be “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) tools, but they often fail to deliver what you desire.
It’s a story older than history. Whether the ochre tint that failed to capture the cave painter’s intent, the papyrus and parchment that wrinkled and faded, the stone tablet cracked by an errant chisel, the inkwell that sullied the paper, or the typesetting gone awry; the story is the same. The medium failed the messenger, either via its inherent limitations or – all too often – via the dreaded user error.
How might Word or LaTeX relate to blogs and blog migration? I use blog content for many purposes, and I often circulate drafts to selected readers via PDF. That means writing using some common tool that can generate PDF, then porting the raw contents to the blog. For this, I use Microsoft Word.
Why? Most blog services have only rudimentary text formatting tools.
Also, when I began writing proposals at NCSA – NSF tomes spanning hundreds of pagers – I shifted from LaTeX to Word. It was the de facto format used by all contributors, making text integration simpler. That habit was reinforced even more strongly when I was a Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, a company whose CEO, Steve Ballmer, once declared open source Linux a “cancer.”
With that backdrop, let’s begin my latest quixotic tale, filled with noble goals, thwarted adventures, and ultimate redemption.
From Typepad to WordPress
As many in the high-performance computing and science and technology policy communities know, I have been writing this blog, Reed’s Ruminations, for almost twenty years, chronicling technology shifts, policy debates, and innovation opportunities. In between, I have reflected on my Arkansas Ozarks childhood and how it shaped my perspectives on life.
For most of that time, my blog has been hosted by Typepad. Alas, on September 1, 2025, Typepad announced that it was discontinuing its hosting service, as of September 30th, and it was time to get to work and move the Reed’s Ruminations blog to a new provider. WordPress was the obvious choice, given its market share and its content management infrastructure. Plus, it had a wider variety of widgets, plugins, and themes than the aging Typepad infrastructure.
Facing this necessary transition, I did what any geek would do. I surveyed my closet of geek attire, pulled on my favorite t-shirt, brewed a large coffee, added a double shot of espresso, and grabbed a MoonPie (banana) for sustenance. I would have made Don Quixote proud as I climbed aboard Rocinante, fully provisioned for the great quest, and a quest it was, complete with foot soldiers and a castle siege!
With nearly 300 posts in the blog, this was no small task. As I worked on the project this past month, I often reflected that it was good I was “retired,” else I doubt I could have finished the task. It easily took 40 hours, scattered betwixt other projects. One friend, Irving Wladawsky-Berger, paid someone to port his blog; I now appreciate why.
Let’s start with my first approach to the castle ramparts, where I sought the key to the blog contents. There, I learned that Typepad has an export tool, but it only exports ASCII text. Grumble. I had twenty years of text AND images in the blog. Forget cloud data egress costs, can you say vendor lock-in, boys and girls? I knew you could!
Like Don Quoxite, I may be an old dreamer, but I am not entirely without skill. I wrote a sed script to extract the image URLs from the exported text. Then, I sent Sancho Panza, disguised as a Chrome browser and armed with wget, to fetch the images from my Typepad URLs. I took special care in reminding him of the importance of stealth, lest he trigger a denial of service response.
Alas, the castle did not give up all its treasure so easily. I then discovered that some of the images were hidden behind cascading style sheet (CSS) popups. Undeterred, I unpacked them and sent Sancho back again with wget to retrieve the last of the images.
Victory was at hand, or so I thought. But no, the default permalink structures on Typepad and WordPress are different. One contains the month and year of the post, while the other also includes the day. Curses – more edits, substitutions, and 301 redirects followed, until at last a surrender was negotiated. All the while, my alter ego, Sancho, whispered sarcastic commentary on this strange and foolish quest.
At this point, it was, to use an old Southern expression, “all over but the shoutin’” leaving only the choice of a WordPress theme – the “look and feel” of the blog. As I examined the many available themes, I was surprised that most focused on the visual experience, with more images than text.
I am an ardent logophile, enchanted by the words and phrasing, and I have even been known to read sentences aloud to friends and colleagues just in admiration of a finely crafted message. (See The Love of Language.) The right words matter, as Strunk and White would attest. Writing is an art form, a painting one can see only in the mind’s eye, and a melody defined by the rhythm and meter of word juxtapositions. For me, that meant choosing a minimalist theme that highlighted the writing rather than the imagery. I hope I have chosen wisely.
If you are reading this, then you know I successfully pulled the big red switch and redirected my hpcdan.org domain name, as well as www.hpcdan.org to the new WordPress site by changing my A record and CNAME. I hope you enjoy it!
Sic Transit Gloria Mundi: The Transitory Web
Chivalry may live forever, but not so web links.
In the aftermath of the transition to WordPress, I ran a broken link checker and was painfully reminded how transient the web really is. Over the past twenty years, companies have failed or been acquired, organizations have ceased to exist, individuals have changed roles or retired, and some websites have simply disappeared.
The most problematic links were those to public documents on government websites – advisory committee reports, Congressional hearings, and agency documents. With changes in the U.S. Congress and the White House, many things have simply disappeared. As a former member of the Advisory Committee on the Electronic Records Archives (ACERA), I remember discussing the mandate to “save everything” the government produces. It’s not easy, and it made me appreciate the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine even more.
Coda
During the transition from Typepad to WordPress, I had the opportunity to reread twenty years of my musings on technology, policy, and society. These older blog posts were a reminder of when the web was young:
- The evolution of social media (SeeTwitter and Tweets, Twitter and Tweets, and Second Life: The Future is Here)
- The growth of web services and the cloud (See Web and Services Futures and Life in the Clouds)
- Global competition and innovation (See Innovation: The Plane of Excellence)
- The future that could be (See Mind to Mind: Building Innovation and A {Racing} Bicycle for the Mind: Helmet Recommended)
My earlier writing also reminded me of how far we have come. Yes, we live in uncertain times, but the future can be bright. To make it so, we must embrace our dreams of what could be, not just the reality of what is, or far worse, the fear of what might be. The tools do matter, but the message matters more.
Please leave a comment …