Monday afternoon, I finished the first round of stories for website2go. It could add a header, with a title based on a subversion property, and a footer to pages. Working with ruby, the first few stories were a matter of a few hours. I had to install some libraries, which is fairly easy as most of them are available as debain packages. Using

apt-cache search

these are fairly easy to find.

Once the first page worked in a test directory, I wondered how to convert my old site to the new. I did not want to destroy my existing site, but do a piecemeal transition. That's a case of eating my own dogfood - when moving to a new content management system, I advocate changing over one part of an existing site at a time.

Making sure the pages still looked the same was a bit painful though. I didn't start the next story on the list put pages through html tidyyet. With this story, only pages conforming to html specification can be generated.

Maybe I should have - preventing errors downstream, before pages go public would have saved me time. Now I had the homepage and other pages close to it done well, only I didn't remove enough of the table layout from the new partial pages (remember, previously every page contained all html, now part of it comes from website2go). So, some pages missed table cells, or had one too many, so their layout was out of whack. The html tidy story could have prevented this.

Manually converting the pages was not so pleasant work, but there weren't that many either, and I only have to do it once. I'll write more on making the tidy story later, as that proved a bit more difficult than I hoped it would be.