Ok so, www.intepid.com has been running reasonably smoothly so far – as far as I can tell. If anyone has noticed any technical problems could you please let me know in the comments section :)

Various notes/thoughts:

• John mentioned that NewsGator was encountering an HTTP error when trying to subscribe to the RSS feed… I can’t reproduce it it Bloglines, SharpReader or NewsGator online, so if anyone else is having a similar problem, please tell me
• Time zones are a pain! I spent a while pulling my hair out wondering why the latest post wasn’t showing up, and then finally realized that WordPress was treating it as a future entry, and therefore not displaying it. This is because posts are uploaded as "local" time, and I am GMT+1100 right now, so as far as local time goes, I’m ahead of almost everybody. Fixing this was a very simple matter of telling WP what my timezone actually was [it was defaulting to GMT-0500 because the new server is in California I think].
• I was also having a problem with the RSS feed for comments, which I want to use so I don’t need email notification. Once again the timestamps were from the future, but this time I think it was an oversight, so I just edited the php file to output GMT time like all the other feeds.
• The page design is based on a popular WordPress template/theme called Kubrick, created by Michael Heilemann. Unfortunately I can’t afford all that lovely whitespace with my 600-pixels of content requirements, so Intepid has become a little more crowded in its layout :(
• I’ve made a few functional changes, like having the archive pages automatically decide whether to use titles, excerpts or full texts depending on the number of posts to be displayed. Also there is a special case where a single post will [should] always be displayed in full with comments, as at its permalink address.
• Something is screwy and comments keep on turning off by default… I added an extra member to force comments to be enabled on in the RPC-XML call, seems to work ok…
• Editing these entries in the online editor seems to bork the formatting of the entire front page… which is a pain

UPDATE: Permalinks should be working now in the desired neat-o format, so the following should serve as the official permalink to this article: http://intepid.com/2004-11-17/11.41

The way that this works really is so cool! You just set up a regex replacement string for pathnames.

For the nerds who’ve never set up a web host but are kind of interested anyway, the string which remaps the permalinks as I prefer them to a WordPress PHP request is:

RewriteRule
^([0-9]{4})?-?([0-9]{1,2})?-?([0-9]{1,2})?/?([0-9]{1,2})?\.?([0-9]{2})?/?([0-9]+)?/?$
/index.php?year=$1&monthnum=$2&day=$3&hour=$4&minute=$5&page=$6 [QSA]

Most important to me was that the permalinks contain no platform specific stuff, like *.php or *.cgi extensions, and no database specific stuff, like a unique ID. This way if for some reason I need to migrate [which I won't [but you can't be too careful] ] to another system it should be a lot easier to manage. It should also mean that I will be [more easily] able to create a mapping from jujusoft.com/log to intepid.com so that incoming links will be correctly remapped [not that there are many, but I can be VERY anal about these things].