Severe entropy generation, ahoy!

I’m conducting an experiment to answer two questions that have plagued mankind since 2005: 1) “what would happen if I switched my blog software from MovableType to WordPress?” and 2) “while we’re doing that, how about changing all of my music from an uniquely-organized hierarchy of mood-based directories and files to iTunes?”

The transition to WordPress is going along better than I thought. It has hooks built in to import several different blog formats, including MovableType, Bloggerspot and LiveJournal. Through arcane knowledge of Apache’s .htaccess files, I’ve been able to map over the most obvious links to the new file structure. Next, fix the formatting. Seeing four-plus years of archives makes me feel very old…

Itunes’ meta data approach appeals to my enthusiasm to slice, dice, and julienne… but it’s not been easy with my large-ish collection in its current state. Is there an easy way to map “Police,” “The Police,” “Sting and the Police” and “The_Police” to just one thing without manually selecting the four artists, selecting all the songs, then doing a Get Info?

4 thoughts on “Severe entropy generation, ahoy!”

  1. No comment. No experience with either (other than commenting about your entries). I used iTunes Store these days for all those “one off” songs I used to buy an entire CD for. My latest purchase was today and was “You Know My Name” by Chris Cornell. This is the title song for the latest James Bond film “Casino Royale” and even though I bought the soundtrack to “Casino Royale” and enjoy the instrumental music on the CD, I really wish the CD had INCLUDED “You Know My Name” so that the CD would be “complete”. (I guess I’ll just have to burn my own “complete” soundtrack for the movie.)

  2. It must be catchy since I have been pondering the same change. The meta data concept is something that’s very appealing. There are plugins that automate the tagging and allow for dynamic ontologies.

    Will be interesting to hear how the change goes. I’m most worried about maintaining existing links to pages. Having to start hacking “htaccess” is a bit of a pain.

    As for the new look and feel… well… it’s cleaner but it has lost some of your uniqueness. But I’m sure you will fix that! ;’)

  3. I like the widget approach; there’s also a plugin for the “tag cloud,” which is a bit intriguing… if it can be done without using Flash.

    Let me know when you get to that point as I’ve worked out some of the .htaccess nuances. (It might be more useful to go from example.)

    I plan to do heavy modification of the look and feel once we have consistent power. (The office was out most of this morning from a blown transformer as they work through the aftermath of last week’s windstorm.)

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