Bye bye, Burnaby! Hello, Laurel!

\o/

If you're reading this, it means my new server is working properly

It's been a long process, there were several websites to migrate and there were several issues too. First, the old data is in utf8 but the database is latin-1, which I solved with some smart scripting to update text and char columns. Second, and a bit more tedious, the database for this website was in a quite disastrous state. I suspect from a risky move from myself: I dared to use a trunk version of wordpress past year and it messed a bit with the categories, but I didn't notice until it was a tad late.

With the latest split from categories into terms, taxonomies and relationships WP2.5, it just went even worse. There were several empty terms, some taxonomies weren't related to any object at all, but their count was not zero and so they were shown in the list and when you accessed them, you got a nice 404 error, etc etc. That was relatively easy to fix with a bit of scripting again. And to top it all, some posts had lost their categories! So, lots of fun adding them again!

I had also been toying with a new theme which would use all the latest css goodness bits from newer browsers such as Safari and ... er ... Konqueror? Box shadows aren't implemented in Firefox yet so that basically ruins my theme idea. I also wanted to have gravatars, but plain gravatars aren't very surprising per se. I finally decided that if I couldn't have shadows and nice effects, then I would have a lo-res theme: only two colours, gravatars included. So if you leave comments here and you have a gravatar associated with your e-mail address, it will be abducted and reduced to a black and white dithered image which nicely fits with this spartan theme. Isn't it great?

I thought I would miss the old server (Burnaby), but I changed my mind as soon as I played with the new one. The admin interface is better and more intuitive, the response times are shorter and the technology is also newer (a shared accelerator versus the old shared hosting scheme). Hopefully there won't be any downtimes or they will be also shorter.

Hope that explains the lack of updates and activity in my online presence of late. And now I want to see your dithered faces in the comments ;-)