Every once in a while, I go through this site and perform some general housekeeping and website maintenance work. The last time I performed a big chunk of maintenance was back in 2008 when I went through and consolidated about 25 categories and subsequently re-categorised a huge number of posts.
The time has come again, this time it is to do with the how I format images within posts. Back in the earlier days of this site, I used a custom image formatting setup which looked quite cool but is less practical. With the more recent versions of WordPress, I just want to be able to use the WYSIWYG editor and focus more on writing and less on the formatting issues.
I’ve got about 80 or so old posts to go through and do a little tidy up on, so I’m thinking I might have it done in dribs & drabs by the end of the week.
After working through a fair number of old posts to tidy them up, it is clear that this is going to take longer than I expected. I was hoping that I could just use the visual editor to remedy the formatting issues but since there wasn’t a ‘normal’ way of doing it in a raft of my older posts – I need to edit the HTML manually on each one – bummer!
Yahoo, I think I have updated all of the posts using the old photo formatting!
To make sure they were all done, I ended up logging into my web hosting control panel to run some SQL against WordPress directly because I kept finding posts that I hadn’t updated while browsing through manually.
I now understand acutely why Dunstan Orchard wrote a PHP script to transform XML image tags into whatever format took his fancy at the time; update the script once and it updates hundreds of image references throughout his site automatically.
While I didn’t bother going to the extent that Dunstan did back in 2004, at least if I need to do something in the future with mine – they are all in the same format now.