More Tinkerings

I’m pleased to say–although this may not be especially exciting for anyone except me–that my imported posts haven’t lost their categories.  (At something like 1200 posts I was dreading doing any kind of recategorising, especially as I did that once already when I consolidated my diaryland and livejournal entries at my wordpress.com blog.  It took weeks.)  The actual category list in the admin pages, however, only recognises those entries that I cut and pasted in from my large xml file before my webhost changed the php around the size of imported files.  So at present the category display is incomplete, which is why I’ve omitted it from the sidebar.  From browsing the wordpress forums, there does seem to be a solution to this, but it involves changing the code in my database, and I’m not yet confident enough to do that.

You can, however, access all the posts in any category by clicking on any of the category links in individual posts.  Or, you can access any category by appending its name (with hyphens for multi-word categories) to http://www.harvestbird.com/blog/category/ … .  If you paste that link alone, however, you’ll get a 404.

Changing the 404 message is another thing I would like to do, with greater ease, I hope, than what I describe above.  Since I hope none of you will have the “page not found” experience on these pages, I reproduce the current version for you below.  I think you will agree, the California surfer is the wrong metaphor for me (what does “punt”, below, even mean?), not least because I cannot swim the two hundred metres that the ex-expat considers the bare necessity for ocean survival.

You 404’d it. Gnarly, dude.

Surfin’ ain’t easy, and right now, you’re lost at sea. No worries, though — simply pick an option from the list below, and you’ll be back out riding the waves of the Internet in no time.

• Hit the “back” button on your browser. It’s perfect for situations like this!
• Head on over to the home page.
• Punt.

I’ve also created a new page in the second side bar, above, called “Research“.  If ever you felt that what was missing from your life was the ability to read my PhD thesis in .pdf form, then, my friend, tonight is your night if you go to that page.

Tagged as: 404, categories