The Reconstruction » meta

A Note on Humility

McCormick — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 03:02:32 +0000

As mentioned before, I recently performed some major maintenance on the site. In the process, I found myself reading through a lot of my old posts. I found some to be really valuable in certain ways, but others I’m frankly a little disappointed in myself to have written. I offer two examples, each of which featured unnecessary swipes at people for whom I actually have quite a bit of respect. While neither of these posts is particularly biting, especially by the often less-than-civil standards of the web, I don’t think that either properly expresses the respect I have for Messieurs Cowen and Krugman, nor do they display a level of humility in accordance with the possibility that I may well have been wrong (a probability that almost all people systematically underestimate). I hope to do better in the future– let’s call this post a commitment strategy.

Migrating from Nucleus to WordPress

McCormick — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 05:54:25 +0000

Apparently the consequence for neglecting a blog for too long and failing to diligently update its software is that spammers will hijack it and insert invisible links to male enhancement products. Not that I didn’t realize this before, but…

Anyway, I’ve moved to a different CMS and taken steps to at least harden it against bot attacks (paying particular attention to this security whitepaper from BlogSecurity). One side-effect of this is that the site has a new (if not original) design. Another is that it’s lost all of its original comments. I’ve saved them so that I can restore them in the future if time permits, but they’re gone for now.

Below the fold: my notes on migrating from Nucleus to WordPress.

First: I found this post on the migration to be really useful. The technique used consists of simply writing out all the Nucleus posts to an RSS feed, cleaning the feed up a bit, and importing it into WordPress. It works for me because:

My blog posts had very few images in them.
I had very few comments on my posts.
Only a few of my posts had significant traffic to them.

In short, it was easy because my blog isn’t terribly popular, and because it was a lot more annoying to include media in Nucleus posts than it is in WordPress.

To clean up the RSS feed using regular expressions, Jess uses something called TopStyle Pro, which costs about $80 (though it looks like there’s a free trial on the website). I decided it would be easier to just use vim, which has the advantages (to me) of being both free (like speech and like beer) and already installed on my machine.

While there are a number of good tutorials on using VIM and Regex, I figure it might help someone if I share the commands I used to clean up the RSS feed…

These eliminate this:

:%s/]]>//g

:%s

This eliminates this: …

:%s/.*<\/link>//g

This eliminates this: …

:%s/.*<\/comments>//g

This replaces with

:%s///g

This replaces with

:%s/<\/b>/<\/strong>/g

I had an issue with line breaks in links in my Nucleus skin, forcing me to use non-breaking spaces. Thus:

:%s/&nsbp;/ /g

Also, of course, quit and save:

:x

Or quit and discard changes:

:q!

If you’ve run across this and found it helpful, leave me a note.

Where I’ve Been

McCormick — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 16:53:15 +0000

I’ve been quiet as of late because I’ve been applying to master’s programs in economics (and econ-related jobs), in addition to a bit of travel. I expect my life to continue to be unusually busy for some time, as I will be starting my new job as an economist with the Bureau of Economic Analysis in mid-May. Until then, packing and moving to the capital are my highest priorities. I haven’t disappeared, though, and am looking forward to writing a bit of new material.

Welcome, and Apologies

McCormick — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 17:01:45 +0000

I’d like to apologize for the lull in activity as of late. As those of you who know me are well aware, my life has been in a state of major upheaval since I last promised to write. I’m slowly working my way back to something resembling normality, though “normal” will certainly be different from now on. Part of this will be getting back to writing– I’ll have new material within a few days.

If this is your first time visiting the site, I’d like to offer a few pieces that I think you might find interesting:
Grand Central Station and Adam Mickiewicz
This CAFE Sucks!
Environmentalism Needs Fewer Socialists

I hope you enjoy it.

Matthew McCormick

I Realize it has Been Quiet Lately…

McCormick — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 13:00:00 +0000

Alas, but from time to time, life intrudes on writing. I hope to find the time to write some new and interesting things within the next week. In the meantime, think about the coming holiday– giving thanks is one of the best reasons possible for a holiday (celebrate the meaning, if not the history)– and take a look at this piece on Slate. It’s a part of their “College Week” series, and I link to it because I strongly agree with the author. This is a rare occurrence, as I usually find the arguments on Slate to be pointlessly contrarian. Regarding this particular piece, I mentioned in passing the need for a widespread understanding of statistics in a previous post titled “Hard Problems“, and I do believe that it is an entirely sensible requirement for undergraduates, painful as it may be.

Site Tweaks

McCormick — Sat, 30 Jul 2005 21:54:24 +0000

I don’t run Internet Explorer, mostly because it sucks. As a result, it took me a little longer than it should have to notice that this site design has the nasty side-effect of causing the page to render all wrong in IE (with the sidebar below the main body) anytime a link breaks across lines. From the viewpoint that designers have to design to some sort of standard that they can expect to be supported by browsers, this is really a problem with IE, not the site design… unfortunately, I want people to be able to browse this site easily, so it’s my problem now. I’m slowly going back and replacing spaces in links with non-breaking spaces, which creates really ugly justified text at times.

So to the IE users out there, I offer a half-hearted apology, and I’m working on it. If you’re forced to use IE, you have my sympathy. If not, go get a copy of Firefox immediately. It’s better, I promise.

I’ve also added a few more links to various economics weblogs on the sidebar. While I may not agree with all the views expressed on all the weblogs, they’re all quality.

Finally, I also made an icon for the site (it’s supposed to be a wrench tweaking at a globe, but it’s hard to do that sort of thing in only 16×16 pixels). I made it mostly just so that browser requests for it would quit showing up in my error logs, but now for those of you who bookmark the site, you’ll have a little picture to remember us by.