This old-school web jest made my day.

Web 1.0 - 2005 - San Francisco
Web 1.0 Flickr Album

From 43 Folders.

I have just had great success importing posts from another WordPress installation into this one. The research took more time than the import/export! For those who are interested in trying the same I recommend exporting to Movable Type format via WordPress Export 0.3 by Eric Pierce and then importing the former WordPress posts as MovableType posts via your import-mt.php (included in your wp-admin directory). The thought of merging databases made my head spin so I’m glad I avoided that option. I have a bit of clean up to do (looks like private posts were imported as drafts), but for a site the scale of mine, this is no big deal.

Historically, fall gardening opportunities pass me by. When the glamour of summer produce begins to wane — squash plants begin to mildew and wither, tomatoes stop ripening, basil turns black — I usually lose interest in the face of autumnal ennui. The garden remains neglected and unattractive until spring. This year will be different! I’m looking into fall friendly plants and plants that will over-winter. Maché, arugula, fava beans… I actually don’t know that much about what works this time of year, but this is a good starting point. To remind myself of what else can be done through the fall and winter, I thought about setting up a Portland - specific gardening calendar.

This is where I segue from Horticulture to Geekery.

To this end, I just ran across a plugin for WordPress that enables multi-author calendar event posting, as well as calendar subscriptions. I could share the calendar with friends and family and hopefully reap the benefit of a pool of gardening knowledge. This is the idealistic dream anyway. We’ll see how it plays out.

I get asked about search engine optimization all the time — in the future, I will simply refer folks to this article by Elise Bauer. There is a lot of hype about “SEO” and lots of folks are happy to sell you the service for a steep fee. The truth is that good content and mutual links with competitors and colleagues go a long way toward improving your results. There are other tricks which Ms. Bauer lists, but making useful and interesting contributions to the “interweb” will always be a sound strategy.