Barking Space

It’s About Time

Last night, I transferred the last MSN Spaces entry into this WordPress blog.

I can’t believe it’s taken a year. That’s insane.

I suppose that most of the problem was due to the fact that WordPress doesn’t have an Import function for MSN Spaces. I know it can do several other Blog formats, including the comments. But not good ol’ MSN Spaces.

My original rationale for using MSN Spaces was because I didn’t have to have an extra password. It used the same information as my Windows Live Messenger ID. Yeah. It was supposed to be easier.

Unfortunately…

• …for quite a long time, many of my readers had problems commenting on my site because they didn’t have a Windows Live account.
• …MSN Spaces’ WSYWIG interface was idiotic. You could type the exact same thing in twice and come away with two completely different bits of code.
• …MSN Spaces is the MySpace of the blogging world. Most of the people that visited my site didn’t have anything meaningful to say, instead choosing to leave weird ASCII art and pimp out their own blogs, which usually involved several inane lists and photos of themselves in various states of undress.

So I decided to move.

I am also a stubborn jackass.

I figured I needed every entry transferred over because I am a perfectionist. This involved…

• Extracting the HTML code for each entry.
• Stripping it down and recoding to actually format my blog the way I like it.
• Creating a new article using that HTML and timestamping it accurately.
• Copying all the comments over one at a time.




I will never do that again.

My old MSN space is now an Amazon.ca affiliate. I doubt that anything will come of it, but at least no one can steal my old Space and use it for evil

Filed under: Announcements, General Dialogue | 9 Comments »