How Not to Blog

Clé · Post by **Clé** » Fri Mar 31, 2023 6:51 pm

I mentioned in my previous blog post that I had a lot of work ahead of me on the Wongery. Another item on the pretty extensive to-do list I have for the Wongery: implementing a more streamlined way to make blog posts.

Here are the steps I currently go through to make a blog post:

Type the blog post up in wikitext in Notepad++
Save the blog post as a text file
Log into the Wongery site's control panel
Manually insert the new blog post into the MySQL database via phpMyAdmin (uploading the text file into the appropriate column).
Open the Wongery main page in another tab (or refresh it if already open)
Glance over the new news post and check for any formatting errors or mistakes in the Wikitext
Correct in the original text file any errors found
Edit the database row for the news post in phpMyAdmin and reupload the corrected text file
Repeat steps 5 through 8 until no further errors are found
Use the browser's "View Page Source" function to copy the HTML code of the new blog post
Paste the HTML code into an online HTML-to-UBBcode converter
Copy the UBBcode from there and paste it into a text file in Notepad
In the text file, manually make changes the online converter misses (mainly adding blank lines between paragraphs and replacing the "&"s with actual ampersands and the "—"s with actual em dashes)
Create a new forum post in the News forum
Paste the text from the text file into the new forum post
Preview the post and then, if everything looks all right, hit "Submit".

If this seems unnecessarily complicated and, well, kind of stupid, yes, it absolutely is. I ought to have a page where I can directly write and edit blog posts on the site. It wouldn't be all that hard to implement, just an HTML form and some relatively simple PHP code. But I haven't gotten around to making it, so instead I've been making all my blog posts through this convoluted method, wasting in aggregate much more time than I would have spent just making the form in the first place.

It's entirely possible that this is one reason I haven't been making blog posts more often, that the hassle of going through all those steps to make a blog post has put me off making them. That's definitely not the only reason I haven't been making blog posts more often; I am nothing if not a master at procrastination, and would no doubt find other excuses not to make blog posts even if it were a more streamlined process. Still, every little bit of removing obstacles and excuses will help.

So, yeah. That's something I'm going to try to get done within the next few days. Or at least the first half of it, actually making the blog post. The second part, steps 10 and on about making a forum post to correspond to the blog post, is going to be a separate issue and a bit more involved to implement, not least because as part of implementing it I want to make a new phpBB extension to add a new tag to embed wikitext in forum posts, and I've never made any phpBB extensions before and have no idea how to do so (I'm pretty sure I can figure it out, but it'll be a nontrivial endeavor to do so). Wait, is there already a phpBB extensions that does this? It seems like I probably would have searched for that before, but I don't actually remember doing that. Okay, just did a quick search and didn't find anything; it's possible there's something out there that could be turned up in a more extensive search, but, eh, if it's hidden away on some obscure site somewhere and not listed in the Extensions Database on the phpBB site I'm not sure I'd trust it anyway. Regardless, I hope in the next few days I'll at least have the first part of the blog-posting process automated, so I can make a blog post through a form on the site rather than through logging into the site control panel and manually inserting it into the MySQL database. As for the corresponding forum post... eh, that I'll have to take care of manually at least for a little longer.

(Also something I need to get done over the next few days: Getting some more dang articles posted in the Central Wongery! That's supposed to be the main raison d'être of the site, after all...)