While constructing the previous post, I noticed a number of things I didn’t like, particularly in the list editing – the lists are cramped together, the lineheights aren’t right, and there’s no way to ‘paragraph off’ a list, like so:

• This is a list item.
• This is a continuing thought within the list item.
• This is another list item.

Notice the break in the continuing item. That’s achieved with a special list item (using <br/> is crude – hard to style.)

If you specify a css rule for a continuing list item like so:

li.continue { list-style:none; margin-top:0.4em!important; }

you can define a ‘continuing list paragraph’. Problem is, when WordPress sees such a thing, it strips it out.

So, I’ve had to crawl through the code and figure out what the heck is going on. Way down deep inside, there’s a file that lists ‘allowedposttags’ – an array of arrays following canonical rules. A bit of a hack, and I’ve got <li> behaving the way I want.

Just have to save off the changes in case of upgrade.

Another thing I like is a stand-off paragraph – something to introduce a new thought in the text, without having to use something like a header. That’s how this paragraph is defined. Again, another class description:

p.class  { padding-top:2.0em; }

Or some such thing, and now I have a stand-off paragraph.

As usual, packages are great – they get things going. But, to get what you want, you have to dig inside of them and control them by the tail. WordPress is no different.

So, there I was – happily using the Google Blogger to keep things on my site, and keep me from having to install yet another piece of software on my server. It was all working fine, until Google’s Blogger facility to host the pages here (to drive the search engines) broke.

And, gathering from comments from others who were experiencing the same problem, Google did not appear to be inclined to fix it – at least not anytime soon.

What’s a diehard techie with a penchant for wordsmithing to do?

Install my own, of course. Thus, a subsequent installation of WordPress to this site, importing the Blogger version into it via the .rss feed, a bit of server redirection to go from the old file-based to the new database-based format (and new sub-domain to serve it), and lo and off – we’re running again with a self hosted blogging system.

Of course, I need to activate the .rss feed stuff, activate tags, get the keywords right, and do something about this theme…

It never ends.

Update: 16-Oct

Voila!

WordPress is up and running, blogs are transported over, a reasonable theme is selected, and overall, things look pretty reasonable. This is the ‘mu’ (multi-user) version of WordPress – I chose it in the event I want to put other blogs up for various domains on the server (I have several.) It’s a bit wanky, but I can make it do what I want.

Only issue left is the pic – it’s a bit scruffy looking. have to clean that up, a bit.

Onward…

Update II: 18-Oct

Chose a different them – no picture issue, after all. I like this one, a lot. It still took some tweaking, but it’s a nice, semi-formal techie look. And there’s room on the side for something or other…

rickb