The Roving Fool

Pain in the ass… Again

February 8, 2021 by Nic

God Bless, today’s been a cluster fuck and a half.

I talked a little bit about a job that I’m currently working on for Homer. I finally got it figured out.

To expand on my comments from yesterday. Life happened, and Homer’s blog went offline for a considerable amount of time. Long enough that his web host no longer had any archives, and his personal archives had gotten lost. Then to top it off, the Wayback Machine was unable to archive anything beyond two pages which is led to obvious problems.

His friend, Flanders (Again, not his real name) had graciously saved an XML export from around the time life happened. I wish I could post the code here to show you how jumbled it was, but I do not want to risk showing who Homer really is. Revealing who he is isn’t my place here.

After fooling around with it over a week, I was finally able to get it into a standardized code to where I could actually read it. All of the tags were on the same line and proceeded for 10,000 lines. In all reality, it is more like 50,000 lines.

After finding a common identifier for each blog post, I’ve been able to go through around a year and a half of blog posts and upload them onto a separate WordPress website. Once I go through around six years of blog posts, I can export the posts from my WordPress site and upload them to his.

Sometimes I wish I charged hourly and not flat rate. But – I enjoy working with Homer. He has been one of my favorite clients, so I have no issue eating costs or going the extra mile for him.

Side note – I started at around 12:30 today, and it is now 11:30 P.M. as I write this. It’s been a long day and I still have a while to go to night. I still have to go to work in the morning (going to work, for me, is waking up and walking five feet to my work terminal. With the new house, I am looking forward to having a separate office).

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