The Obscurer

On Monday, Blogger finally got back to me about my permalink problem. They had looked at my website and said that “the problem seems to be resolved already”. And indeed it had been, because I had moved to WordPress the day before. So credit to Blogger for finally trying to sort out the problem, but I’ve moved on now and I can’t be bothered to go back.

So; without going all “Oscars” on you, a few thanks are in order regarding the move.

• To my brother for installing the files and creating a MySQL database, whatever that is. He insists that what he did was very simple and only took a few minutes; I am certain that had I attempted it we would have been talking hours, and then it still wouldn’t have worked. Cheers our kid.
• Ady Romantika for his Blogger RSS Import plug-in, which made importing all my Blogger posts and comments while maintaining my existing permalink (and fixing the broken ones) so easy that I might have done this ages ago had I known.
• Owen Barder and Tom Sherman for their scripts that, with a few amendments, even mean that all my old obscurer.blogspot.com permalinks now re-direct to the correct posts on obscurer.co.uk. My life is complete.

Now that everything has been set up don’t be surprised to see some tinkering and fiddle-faddling here over the next few weeks until I get things “just so”. I’ve installed the veryplaintxt theme which I have subsequently butchered amended to keep some of the look of my old site, and taken advantage of the move to ditch some of the JavaScript bollocks such as the BBC NewsBox that no-one read and the Google Ads that earned me no money. I’ve also replaced all the little buttons and logos with simple text links which for the time being makes thinks look clean and uncluttered; if I start thinking it looks stark and dull I may change things around, but not yet. I’ve also felt the need to squeeze each post into an ill-fitting category that I may change over time, if only because being in an unsuitable category seems preferable for the moment to being condemned to being labelled “uncategorised”. I care for my posts.

Finally, for my feedreader friends, it looks like the redirect for the atom.xml and rss.xml feeds has worked so you needn’t change your feed settings after all. Mind you, if the redirect doesn’t work, and you haven’t changed your feed, you won’t be able to read this anyway. So there.

That’s enough introspection. Any suggested improvements, or questions regarding the move, feel free to get in touch. Until next time.

Over the next few days I’ll be moving The Obscurer over from Blogger to WordPress. If you read this via a feedreader such as Bloglines, NetVibes or Google Reader then you may want to set the feed you subscribe to as feeds.feedburner.com/obscurer if it isn’t already, as that will survive the change. That will guarantee that you still receive this nonsense, although I will also be setting up a redirect so that hopefully the atom.xml and rss.xml feeds will also work come the day.

Otherwise the only real change you should notice will be a bit of a redesign of this site. The URL will remain the same as www.obscurer.co.uk, and all the old permalinks should still work, although the archives will be in a different format. Even better, the recent permalinks that have been broken in Firefox should be fixed; and indeed it is Blogger’s abject failure to make any effort to resolve this problem, or even to acknowledge my emails on the subject, that is the only reason I feel forced to make the move.

So, if over the course of the next few days you visit here and either the site is down or there is a strange error message, it will be because I will be hard at work, scratching my head and wondering what has gone wrong. It won’t be because I have jacked this whole thing in, and if you pop back the following day all should be as right as rain.

I hope.

Change is for the better, except when it makes things worse. Blogger recently forced me to migrate this blog from the old platform to New Blogger. The most obvious “improvement” is that all the permalinks for the posts written since I moved are broken if you use Firefox, as I know many of you do. As a result, Firefox users are currently unable to leave comments here; not a major problem I’m sure, but a pain in the arse all the same.

So. For the time being, if you want to leave a comment, either use Internet Explorer or in Firefox, click on the permalink, add “.html” after the URL in the address field and hit “go”, and you should end up at the right place. I think. Failing that, send me an email.

I’ll update you when I have resolved the problem by whatever means necessary.

So you made it! The switch over from obscurer.blogspot.com to www.obscurer.co.uk went fairly smoothly, once I had figured out how to configure my archives, but all in all it was pretty hitch free.

Except.

When I checked if things were working on Firefox (yes, I am one of those Neanderthals who prefer IE) the cache or history or whatever meant that the redirect instruction from the new site back to the old site was still in place, preventing Firefox users from coming here. I’ve tried a quick fix to stop the redirect problem but I’m not sure it will work, so if you have only just landed here after a few months of trying then that is probably because the old page has dropped out of your cache. I think.

Things look the same around here, except for the absence of the Blogger navbar at the top of the page; I’m staying with Blogger for the time being because it suits me fine. I may move to MoveableType or WordPress at some point but I don’t know if I’ll ever bother; in any case, that is an ambition that will surely founder on the rocks of my own incompetence.

One thing about having your own domain name, of course, is that it is easy for anyone to find out the details of the owner of the site. This effectively has ended any possibility that I will ever reveal who I work for or explicitly criticise my employer; I haven’t done so this far, and indeed I may never have done so anyway, but I definitely won’t now. It’s no big secret, it’s not like I work in the heart of government or anything, but even my employer’s IT department must be able to do a whois enquiry, so I’m certainly keeping schtum.

So that’s more or less it; welcome to the new URL, thanks for sticking with me, although I apologise in advance if your loyalty goes unrewarded. The new Obscurer will be exactly like the old Obscurer, including the irregular long gaps between posts; indeed looking at the next week ahead, with a heavy workload, a wedding anniversary and 3 year old’s birthday approaching, not to mention over 50 minutes of holiday video that require whittling down into something vaguely watchable, I don’t know when I will update this site next; but if you’ve made it this far I suspect you know all about my ways. Hang around and the usual drivel will appear here soon enough. I’m just not entirely sure when.

PostScript: as predicted my new atom feed is www.obscurer.co.uk/atom.xml, and my FeedBurner feed remains feeds.feedburner.com/obscurer. Update what you need to update, if you understand such things.

Well, I need a holiday to get over my holiday etc. But I’m home now, and I’ve even done a few days in work readjusting to what it means to have to bother about such things as what the time is, an irrelevance when cottage bound in Cornwall; and I think I have got back into the swing of things admirably.

The “luxury” of holidaying in this country is that you can, if you wish, keep up with the nation’s toings and froings and comings and goings, so I think I am up to date on the things that matter; the final(?) flailing Blair reshuffle; the release of the “narrative” on the 7/7 bombings that rightly hasn’t ended the desire for a full public enquiry; the elevation of Melanie Slade’s boyfriend into the England World Cup squad (pipping Shaun Wright Phillips presumably because the latter hasn’t played much Premiership football this year); and inevitably, the one candidate I explicitly criticised in my last post on “The Apprentice” only goes and wins the damned thing (which either proves that what I know about business could be written on a stamp while still leaving space in the margin for some doodles, or that siralan doesn’t actually mind managerial bollocks (“I’ll give 110%”, “am passionate about…”, “dedicated to…”, “have an instinct for…”) so long as it comes parcelled up in a rags-to-riches (or Kwik Save to quick off-shorer) tale.

But of course the most important news that you are all hanging on for is my scheduled move from blogspot to my own domain; and rather surprisingly it is all on course. At some point tomorrow (Friday 26th May) I will move this whole thing to www.obscurer.co.uk and that will be the place to go for my sporadic rubbish in future. I will try to leave a forwarding post here, but I am not sure quite how that will work. If you subscribe via FeedBurner then that link shouldn’t change; I assume my new atom feed will be www.obscurer.co.uk/atom.xml, so if that is your rss/xml source you may need to do a bit of fiddling about. Check back on the new site tomorrow for confirmation.

For some of you, who have perhaps been following this blog with a certain lack of enthusiasm recently, kept on by a faint hope that I will write something as half-decent as the post that attracted you here in the first place, then amending your bookmarks or favourites with my new address may be too much for you and so this may be the time when we part company; in which case good luck, I don’t blame you and indeed thanks for sticking with me for so long. For those who do make it to the new URL I can’t promise anything other than more of the same, so don’t say you haven’t been warned.

So that’s it, and I hope to see you again soon at the new place.