The Return of Of Course I'll Play It

So one of the things I promised myself I'd do, once I finished Atomic City Adventures, was to return to blogging, in some fashion.  And since the introduction of Google+, I'd already decided that I'd take up the mantle of blogging here at blogger, with the notion that I'm hopeful when it gets rolled into and under the Google+ umbrella, it's done so in a first class citizen fashion, as G+ is where I spend the majority of my social network time right now anyway.  What would be especially swank would be if comments on a G+ thread that is linked to a blog on blogger would get turned into or in someway push back to comments at your blog site, so you can capitalize on the impressions a bit.  That is, at least, my hope.  Regardless, I realize that comments at blog sites are pretty much going away these days, with people doing their discussion at the almagamater - G+.  So I figure blogger is best poised to take advantage of that in some way.

So I've got a little over 2 years of posts though at OfCourseIllPlayIt, and as I was creating my blogger blog, I saw an Import option.  "Oooh - I can import my old blog!  Sweet!  Of course they'll support WP import.. I mean it's the most popular blogging platform in the world!"  So without really checking further, the thirst thing I did was to restore the old OfCourseIllPlayIt WP site.  About four months ago, I was forced, due to circumstances beyond my control, to transfer all of my domains to a new account, and at that point I backed up OfCourseIllPlayIt, but decided not to restore it until I could return to it.  So I busily set about this morning setting up a new MySQL database, uploading my old WP site to a directory on my webspace, and even jumped into MyPhPAdmin and imported the entire WP database.

So the first thing that went wrong was that, even though I had specified UTF-8 encoding on both import and export, a rather significant number of the characters in my posts and comments were mangled.  Like.. pretty much every double quote, single quote, whatever, was now some collection of latin character sets.  And brother, let me tell you, I use quotes a lot!   Well.. I said to myself.. it's still readable.. and these are old posts, so I guess we can live with that.

But the site was up and readable, all the posts and comments were there.. and I was golden.  Or so I thought.  Because when I went to import my blog - guess what blogger allows you to import!  That's right... other blogger files!  Gah!  So a bit more googling later, I found an online coverter that would take a WRX WP exporter, and turn it into a blogger exporter.  So I ran my already munged WP blog through the magic xml converter tool, and imported the blog.

So.. apparently something the XML converter guy didn't bother with was trying to maintain paragraphs.  So yeah.. now I've got 74 posts, hundreds of comments, all rife with mangled character sets and with all paragraphs, bold, italics, everything - stripped out.  Each post is just one like continuous single paragraph. Bleah!

So we're starting new!  Welcome to the new Of Course I'll Play It!  I'll be mucking about with the theme over the next few days - suggestions are welcome - and I might even return to the old blog and see about restoring a few posts I thought were worthwhile, but for now, it's forward!

Of Course I'll Play It will continue to focus mostly on MMO's - both ones I'm playing, and design thoughts on same.  But as I've just completed creating a single player 3rd person action game, I'm also playing more of them these days, so there will be plenty of posts about gaming in general here as well.  If you're new, welcome!  And if you're one of the 5 loyal readers that visited the old site - welcome back!

Comments?  Sure, feel free to leave them here!  Or if not, I'm at Google Plus too.. :)