Sillybean

Migrating single WordPress installations into multisite networks

Last week, I had to migrate a bunch of single WordPress installations into one big network. As part of the tinkering I’d done with the new network features while I was writing about the 3.0 features, I’d done this sort of migration in limited tests, but I’d never tried it with real data.

I had eight sites to move. Some of them were very small — between 10 and 15 pages, no posts — and one was very large, with nearly a thousand posts and pages carefully divided into about 30 categories, with lots of post tags and about 40 users.

Buckle up; this is going to be bumpy. (more…)

Review double shot: Feed and An Artificial Night

Remember back in April, when I gushed a bit about Seanan McGuire, and I was all excited that she had a new book coming out the next day? Well, I never got around to reviewing that book, mainly because there was just too much to say, but I’m going to try anyway. And, hey, she has another new book coming out tomorrow! I scored an ARC in one of her Twitter giveaways, so I can review that, too.

Short version: I’m still loving the October Daye series, but Feed (written as Mira Grant) is my favorite book of the year so far. Mind you, this is a year that includes (among other things) Jennifer Crusie’s first solo novel in six years, the first new Miles Vorkosigan book in nine years, a new romance from Joanna Bourne, the sequel to Retribution Falls, and the most kick-ass installment of the Dresden Files since the one with the zombie dinosaur. Lots of things I was really looking forward to, in other words, and they were all great. Still, Feed wins.

And Seanan won the Campbell Award over the weekend, which I think is well deserved.

[Cut for long.] (more…)

what I’ve been up to

The last few weeks have been eventful, and not really in a good way. I’ve spent a good chunk of my summer trying to nail down what’s going on with some strange health issues, and a road trip to see a specialist turned up nothing — which is good, I don’t have a dread disease, but we still don’t know what’s wrong — but I had a bit of car trouble on the way there and had to get it fixed before I came home, so that was more stress than I really wanted.

Then I got a phone call from my mom. She went out back to water her plants, slipped off the deck, and broke one foot while twisting the other ankle. She couldn’t walk, and she was home alone. The neighbor heard her and came out to see what was wrong, so they got her an ambulance and whisked her off to the ER.

I’d planned to visit my parents the next weekend anyway, since Michael was off on a road trip, so I took a couple of days off and extended the trip. By the time I got there, she said my dad had been feeding her cheese sandwiches for four days, so I made an enormous grocery list and spent three and a half days cooking. When I left, they had about two weeks’ worth of food in the freezer, and Mom had made it through the entire first season of Mad Men on my iPad while she was elevating her foot.

When I got home, around 10:30 on a Tuesday night, I discovered that our air conditioner had died. Apparently the temperature got up somewhere around 110°F that day, and by the time I got there it was 94 inside. I started texting people to see who was still awake, and managed to find a friend who’d let me crash for the night. (Letting someone sleep on your living room floor at eleven on a weeknight is above and beyond the call of friendship, I must say.) Got it fixed the next morning without much fuss, fortunately.

There were some issues with my publisher that week as well, which I’m not going to go into here. It was all quite ridiculous and made me want to punch walls.

Friday, I had to whip up the slides for OpenCamp, drive to Dallas, and get up Saturday to do my thing. That went well. Alas, I got food poisoning on the way home, and spent Monday curled up in bed listening to an audiobook.

Tuesday, I worked until 10pm. In fact, through Friday, it was incredibly stressful at work. It was the first week of classes, and I had to migrate a whole bunch of sites between servers, and some things did not go well, and overall I never want to spend another week like that again.

The server migrations are mostly done now, but I’m still feeling puny, as my grandmother would have said. I was going to bake some stuff, which would have required a trip to the grocery, and then go see a movie. Michael took one look at me, curled up in my writing chair in yoga pants and a wrinkled T-shirt, with a sweater and a messy ponytail, and said, “You are not going anywhere,” and he was right. The upset stomach comes and goes, and as you might imagine, the insomnia is kicking my ass more than usual. He got the stuff, though, so I might do the baking later. The movie is right out, but we have something from Netflix.

I kind of want to crawl into bed and not come out until Thanksgiving.

WordPress Hidden Gems (OpenCa.mp presentation) on Slideshare

My presentation for OpenCa.mp this afternoon, WordPress Hidden Gems, is up on Slideshare. I’ll fill in some slide notes later, since it’s mostly screenshots and there’s much text in the transcript. Enjoy!

Good pizza

We’ve had good luck with Smitten Kitchen recipes lately. The scalloped tomatoes were so good we made them twice more — Michael especially likes the breakfast suggestion with the egg — and the cheddar biscuits were pretty great. So this weekend I wanted to find a good pizza sauce recipe. Our plain tomato sauce is amazing, but didn’t have enough kick to work well as a pizza sauce.

So, when I saw recipes for pizza sauce and dough on Smitten that originally came from Mario Batali, I figured they were worth a shot. And Michael came home with two huge bunches of asparagus the other day (one white, one green), so I thought we’d try the asparagus pizza too. We recruited a couple friends to help with the baking and the eating, and… well, NOM. We were a little short on mozzarella, but we grated some white cheddar to fill in, and that made a great combination. For the sauce, I decided to start with canned peeled tomatoes, since it’s already getting hard to find good fresh ones. That worked; I just let it cook down while we waited for the dough to rise. I kept adding red pepper flakes to make the sauce spicier. (I wasn’t kidding about wanting a kick. Michael: “Who are you, and what have you done with my wife?”)

Our guests brought peaches that were a little underripe, so they fixed that by caramelizing them with butter and brown sugar, and we dumped them over the fresh batch of vanilla ice cream I’d just put in the freezer.