I took a nap at about 7:30 Thursday night but ended up sleeping until 3am Friday morning. I wasn’t tired so I decided to use the time to work on my site.

One of the things I did was remove all the comment links to the entries I imported from my other posting system. I don’t expect anyone to want to add comments on the old entries and if anyone is planning that, they have some serious extra time on their hands.

I could have exported the entries, changed the comment value from 1 to 0, deleted the existing entries and then imported the altered ones, but I didn’t. I edited each one manually, unchecking the “Allow Comments” box and saving. I don’t know of an easier way to do it from within MT and even though my way was quite tedious it got the job done.

An essential reason that I value programming is that it enables one to complete a task much faster and easier. If you ever have to repeat the same task later on, it’s trivial to do. If I had had 5,000 entries to change instead of 279, I would have been forced to have done it another way because the process would have taken far too long. (The 279 changes took me about an hour or so to complete.) There’s always a balance I try to find between how long it will take to do something manually and how long it will take to write the program or script to automate it.

While I was removing the comment links I noticed that a few of the titles were repeats. I like to think of unique titles for every entry but I guess my mind is more deterministic than I thought. Given a similar topic, it spits out the same title. I didn’t even realize I had identical titles until I looked at each one, so it’s probably best that I made the changes manually because I was able to alter the titles.

On Thursday I forgot to eat lunch and to visit my daily links (comics, news and blogs.) I like working on something that engrossing. I wouldn’t want to do it every day, but I like getting into the zone where you forget about everything else except what you’re working on. It can be very productive.