Oct 02 2015

Transitions, Transitions

The Big News

As of October 15th our host and the provider of our site software, warecorp, will stop support for our platform, the developed variant of the Perl based Daily Kos 3.0 in Java originally called jscoop by it’s author, pacified, and now known as Soapblox.

Yup.  I am really, really old- 49281, well over 10 years now.  DocuDharma just passed the 8 year mark and was one of the early adopters of Soapblox and there are over 39349 essays, as well as 371167 comments.  Our other site, The Stars Hollow Gazette, started July 4th, 2010 and is 5+ years old and has 13318 diaries and 60718 comments.  TMC and I founded The Stars Hollow Gazette and we have been in sole control of DocuDharma since January 2011 (oh, and I was also a founder of that).

What Does This Mean?

I’m not here to brag, I do that on our anniversaries, I am preparing you for the crisis which we will hopefully make as little fraught as possible.

Warecorp has transitioned the sites to WordPress, a totally different piece of software, and they have done the best job they could to make it look and feel like our good old Soapblox.  They have also put us in touch with a firm that specializes in customizing WordPress sites.  I have been studying (online with a Tech Dirt discount) WordPress, but it has been hard to relate without knowing what warecorp has already done for us.

The bottom line is that we’ll continue on as if nothing is going to change until it does and then we will present what we have at that time.

What Will Change?

It’s difficult to say at the moment.  Our transition sites just went live and we haven’t had time to evaluate them.  One thing we’ve talked about is using Disqus to drive our commenting system.  It’s not peeder Ajax but maybe it’s good enough.

There are things I’d like to do to freshen the sites but they may not be possible.  In any event they’ll be rolled out gradually when things are stable because, as a computer professional, I know you have to limit your variables.  We will always seek to achieve Daily Kos 3.x functionality because to my mind that was the easiest and best blogging system in the world.

Your Stuff

The thing to understand about blogs is that they’re basically an SQL (Structured Query Language) database and the front end, the user interface, is fundamentally a report or a data entry form.

If you have been a contributor of content or comments I totally understand your justifiable concern they might disappear.  Warecorp is providing us with archives of the underlying SQL databases which contain everything you’ve written.

These are the links to download that-

Independent of migration to WordPress Platform we’re sending you full archive of blog database as well as all uploaded files.

Here are downloadable links:

Files are updated daily at midnight CST and will be available at least month after we stop Soapblox hosting.

The Big Wind Up

We are all about continuity and persistence, we’ll work on this until we get it right.  We ask for your indulgence until that happens and will update you as events warrant.

9 comments

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    • Robyn on October 2, 2015 at 20:44
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    …that I can dig up when I feel I need to do so.  I keep copies on my own computer as well, but they exist at the mercy of the next OS upgrade.

  3. Johnny the Conqueroo (JtC) here. I’m not familiar with WordPress but the server’s file system and database should be fairly consistent with what I’m used to.

    If you have access to the server side and cPanel, then the basic procedure is to create a new empty database, upload the archived database to the newly created empty db, and then you’ll need to edit a couple of files in the site’s file/folder system to point to the new db. Of course it’s a bit more complicated than that, but that’s the general idea.  

  4. if this will stop this site from crashing firefox 9 out of 10 times that i come here. let’s hope.  

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