Unveiling the new and improved ELAC

Cross-posted from Transient Langauges and Cultures

This blog is now well into its fifth year and in all that time, not much has changed (apart from the new ‘look’ which was imposed on us from above). But a major development has now taken place: we have moved to a new home.

Regular readers will know that many contributors to this blog (such as Peter Austin, Jenny Green, David Nash among others) do so under Jane Simpson’s user account. This is because the blog’s user accounts are managed as part of the University of Sydney’s wider authentication system, meaning that only staff or students of the university could have an account.

Now, Jane Simpson has moved to the Australian National University, so we decided late last year to migrate the blog out of the confines of the Sydney University user authentication system and host it ourselves, on a server that PARADISEC won in 2008.

The process of moving the blog has taken quite some time, due to many factors – including the thousands of characters that were not recognised by the export function and were neutralised to either ??? or ??, the different method that Movable Type and WordPress use to create post URLs or ‘slugs’ (WordPress separates words with dashes, Movable Type with underscores and stops after a certain number of characters), and a bug in the WordPress plugin used for importing Movable Type exports which changed authors seemingly randomly.

I digress.

The point is, after several weeks of hard work, I am proud to announce the unveiling of the brand-spankin’-new, renamed, refurbished and repackaged, Endangered Languages and Cultures.

The new blog contains all posts and comments from the old blog, and also comes with a twitter feed (@paradisecblog) so you can keep track of new posts. If you currently link to the original Transient Languages and Cultures blog on your website or blog, we would appreciate you updating your link address.

Also, while the difficulties faced in the migration process were mostly ironed out, we have very likely missed lots. If you find anything untoward, a missing or broken link for instance, please don’t hesitate to contact me and report the problem.

4 thoughts on “Unveiling the new and improved ELAC”

  1. Nice work! I particularly like the way you’ve separated out the old posts made under Jane’s account into the new user accounts. Bravo!

  2. That was done easily by regex search and replace. Restoring many of the ??? or ?? to what they were originally however, took me probably 5 hours. Also, rewriting post URLs to internal links had to be done manually…
    Basically I’m quite glad it’s finished, and happy with the result.

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