Migration of Posts From 'This Old Book'

January 19, 2013 Patrick LaForge

My ongoing experiment with Squarespace6 continues. My hope was to migrate all of the content I have created on various sites like Tumblr, Wordpress and Posterous into one domain that I control and own.

I hit a bit of a snag with my This Old Book Tumblr, which somewhat randomly catalogs books that have survived many library purges over the decades. I was able to import the posts but unable to move individual items into the main blog column here on the site. So, instead, the Tumblr posts, with the exception of a few that I duplicated here on the Palafo blog, may be found in this on-site archive, until such time as Squarespace6 makes it easer to merge collections, or I decide to do so manually. Inexplicably, the headline fields for the posts (there were no headlines on Tumblr) appear at the bottom instead of the top. Henceforth, the occasional This Old Book post will appear here on the main blog, and if I write enough of them I will create a link to the tag up in the header.

Here is a list of the books covered to date:

"Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony" by Lewis Thomas

"Essays by Robert Louis Stevenson"

"Silverlock" by John Myers Myers

"Bourgeois Anonymous" by Morris Phillipson

"The Media Lab" by Stewart Brand

"America: What Went Wrong?" by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele

"A Night of Serious Drinking" by Renee Dumaul

"Been Down So Long, It Looks Like Up to Me" by Richard Fariña

"The Glass Teat" and "The Other Glass Teat" by Harlan Ellison

"The Deptford Trilogy" by Robertson Davies

"A Book of Surrealist Games"

"Without Feathers" by Woody Allen

"The Mezzanine" by Nicholson Baker

"Boss" by Mike Royko

"Thinking With Concepts" by John Wilson

"The Common Ground Book"

"The Tales of Hoffman" (Edited Chicago 7 Transcript)

"Out of Control" by Kevin Kelly

"Son of the Morning Star" by Evan S. Connell

"The Capra Chapbook Anthology"

"Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking" by Jessica Mitford

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter

"An East Wind Coming" by Arthur Byron Cover

"Soul Catcher" by Frank Herbert

"Crackers" by Roy Blount Jr.

"The Dead Father" by Donald Barthelme

"Generation X" by Douglas Coupland

"Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

"The Book" by Alan Watts

"Labyrinths" by Jorge Luis Borges

"The Straight Dope" by Cecil Adams

"Ian Shoales' Perfect World" by Merle Kessler

"The Authoritative Calvin & Hobbes" by Bill Watterson

"Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur"

"The Illuminatus! Trilogy" by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson

"Shiny Adidas Tracksuits and the Death of Camp" by the Editors of Might

"The Dog Is Us" by Marcelle Clements

"Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book" by Walker Percy

"Cosmic Consciousness" by Richard Maurice Bucke, M.D.

"The Philosopher's Stone" by Colin Wilson

"The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog"

"The Arbor House Treasury of Modern Science Fiction"

Experimenting With Storify on Squarespace

December 3, 2012 Patrick LaForge

Using the @nytimes newsroom staff list on Twitter.

Some Known Issues

September 16, 2012 Patrick LaForge

The transfer of the blog from Wordpress proved pretty easy. I had a brief moment of panic until I figured out how to do a proper 301 redirect to add the word "posts" to all the links out there pointing to my old site. Please let me know if you find any dead links.

I like this readymade template from Squarespace -- TAKK by Krystyn Heide -- but I'm thinking of bumping up the point size. These old eyes.

The only other issues I'm seeing are some minor text formatting problems and some embedded videos that didn't make the trip over from Wordpress and Posterous. It appears that the import didn't handle the Posterous slide shows properly, either. But that is O.K. Most of those pictures were low quality snapshots.

I also switched This Old Book back to a simple link to Tumblr, because I can't figure out an easy workflow that will let me host it here and on Tumblr. I'll have to think about that some more. I may kill off the Posterous/Photos import as well. The pictures there are not great, and this main blog will be gray if I separate out all the pictures. Perhaps I should use categories to set up a stream of the better photos.