Badger: The Second Coming

For about a year and a half I was using a hand-made PHP weblog script to run World of Badger. However, it had a few bugs and lacked some features (comments etc.) that I now wanted, so I thought I’d cobble together a new one. Unfortunately, being so busy lately meant that I kept putting off the re-write, and in the end, as I was swapping servers, I decided to give one of the free, ready-made blog scripts a whirl.

I did consider Movable Type (which I’ve used elsewhere), but eventually opted for pMachine as I wanted to stick to PHP. Feature-wise the two are pretty similar, but pMachine has the edge when it comes to ease of set-up (quite possibly the nicest installer script I’ve ever used), although it is perhaps slightly more complex to customise (neither is exactly rocket science though).

The only difficult part was getting all the old entries from my previous blog converted for pMachine. In the end I had to use a lot of find/replace and regular expressions on the MySQL data — and even Microsoft Excel at one point! If you ever want to convert a Unix timestamp to dd mm yyyy format in Excel (!), here’s the formula:

=(x+y)/86400+DATE(1970,1,1)
where x = Unix timestamp and y = 3600 (for GMT)

So far I’ve found pMachine to be excellent, although obviously I’ve hacked quite a few bits to suit my tastes. Although it mostly uses CSS and validates as XHTML 1 Transitional, I wanted to go the extra step and take it to XHTML 1 Strict and get rid of any tables that were used for non-tabular data.

As for the look, I quite fancy having a new design, even though I’m still quite fond of the old green/pink/yellow theme, so I’ll probably add a little style-switcher so people can choose their favourite.

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