I’m too lazy and demotivated to write anything interesting, so instead I’m going to post some pics from recent Medieval Market Excursions
Frankfurt Mittelalter markt
The medieval market of Frankfrut happened in Offenbach and it was quite crowded. I guess mostly because so many people could come without traveling far.
There were quite a few interesting items on sale but I especially liked these blobs on sale
And there was also some extreme cuteness
Burghayn
This was the first medieval market I went in germany back more than one year ago. This time the market was much much bigger
I also had a chance to wear some new clothes and there were surprisingly many people in medieval attire as well.
There was also some great swordfighting to be seen and I managed to get some great action pics. I find the last one especially cool.
I also tried to take some artistic photos
And finally, I got to see Schelmish in all their glory again. It was a very short gig however 🙁 Nevertheless, you too can enjoy some pure medieval music now.
I’ve just discovered a little plugin, Zemanta ((h/t sudobash)), that claims it can make my blogging easier and I was wondering how true that might be. Thus this post, which is party a test to check the capabilties.
Apparently what this plugin does it that it finds related pictures, tags, links and articles to your post content and proposes them for you to use. I am already using the Photo Dropper Wordpress plugin which can find for me Creative Commons licensed content in flickr that is related to my post, but Zemanta promises to take this a step further.
Image by Zemanta via CrunchBase
I’ve just discovered a little plugin, Zemanta ((h/t sudobash)), that claims it can make my blogging easier and I was wondering how true that might be. Thus this post, which is party a test to check the capabilties.
Apparently what this plugin does it that it finds related pictures, tags, links and articles to your post content and proposes them for you to use. I am already using the Photo Dropper WordPress plugin which can find for me Creative Commons licensed content in flickr that is related to my post, but Zemanta promises to take this a step further.
Currently it comes in the form of either a browser or a server plugin. The first form would be appropriate for someone who does not want to load up his blogs with extra scripts and generally blogs from the same place always (say, home). The second form, for which I went for, is better for someone who might blog from 2-3 different locations.
As I’m using it, it looks quite good. I especially like the automatic tag suggestions, and while there are other plugins that can do the same, it’s good that you don’t need 4 different installations. The only thing that wasn’t obvious is that you need to save your article at least once before suggestions start coming in. However once they start, they update every 300 words to give you stuff more relevant to what you are typing in.
So I think I’ll keep it. I’ve already installed it in various of the blogs I manage and I think it will be especially useful for people who just don’t have much time to look around for images or think of tags.
There’s quite a bit or worrying lately in Europe about the creeping Islamization that is occurring. We are seeing the slow buildup of tensions between the values that most European hold and the barbaric ones proposed in the Qu’ran and the Hadith.
Many people, including me, are quite annoyed in the way that our governments and international bodies are not only caving in to Islamic demands, but are actually protecting their hateful doctrine. Instead of seeing a strong secular opposition to the demands of religious extremists, they are given even more rights and more entitlements than any other European.
What most appals me is how the politicians who are supposedly representing us, instead cater to the religious extremist vocal minority, simply because it’s a very nice chunk of a voting block. Now that wouldn’t be much a problem if our republics were working as they should, as these pandering leaders could simply be voted out, but this is not really happening.
The same parties who at one point decide to pander to religion, end up simply getting re-elected, if not in the next election, at the one after that. Why? Because people will still vote them up, no matter what they do. It’s because people do not vote with their mind and based on previous events. They vote with tradition.
This is one the biggest failing of the bipartisan system most countries have ended up with.
You have two political parties that are neck-to-neck in each election. This is because the largest part of the electoral body traditionally votes for the same party and most are under the impression that not voting either, is the same as voting for the opposition.
Because these parties are so close in vote-count and because the traditional members of each cannot be swayed, the only ones who can tip the scales are the undecided voters.
Politicians thus tend to focus on appeasing what looks like the largest party of undecided which might make the difference in the next election.
The vocal minorities, always look as if they have a much bigger sway and presense than reality.
Religious extremists tend to be very vocal.
And there you have it. When politicians and political parties know that your vote is certain, no matter what they do, they will not look into your interests. They will try to appeal to the people who’s votes are not certain to go in either way and since they know you won’t dare to do anything else than keep voting for them, they will erode your freedoms, your rights and your society to appease the undecided voters.
The bipartisan system does not work. It has shown it does not work in every country that has achieved it as the only thing that ends up happening is that power passes from one party to the other and society gets a little bit worse with each election.
In Europe, this situation becomes even worse now. With the insertion of Muslims as a voting block, the only way to appease them is to push your society closer and closer to Sharia law as they will inadvertently vote for the party that does.
It is this why I am absolutely opposed to voting for any party that acts or has acted like that in the past. I do not care if not voting for the lesser evil will lead the “larger evil” to take place. I’d rather vote with my conscience than be a party to the dissolution of my freedom.
If we, as Secularists do not withhold our votes from the politicians who will move us towards theocracy in their attempt to appease the very same people we oppose, then we are consigning simply to the slow death of our societies and our eventual marginalization.
And not only is it our duty not to vote for them, but we should be telling them loud and clear, before and after each election why they did not get our vote. Perhaps then they might start listening.
In this article I want to write an easy, step-by-step guide on how you can transfer your blog from a free account hosted in Blogger to a Dreamhost powered WordPress installation. I’m writing this now as my memory is quite fresh from my recent migration and hopefully this will come useful to others who might be thinking of doing this themselves.
Select “Host a Domain” as the other choice is just to get a new domain name through Dreamhost
In Step 2 Select the yearly option as it’s the most sensible for someone with a low budget.
In Step 3 You don’t need to select anything unless you plan to run a lot of heavy scripts and have a bit of traffic.
In Step 4, Uncheck Google Apps if you want to use Dreamhost’s custom options. This is a good option if you just a WordPress blog for now. You can always turn it up later.
In Step 5, leave it as it is, and type the domain name you would like and a username for your ftp access.
In Step 6, fill your information in.
In Step 7 type dbzer0 to get 20$ off or dbzero@gmail.com if you want to be extra nice to me 😉 Check the Box and go to Payment
Go through the payment stuff and wait until you receive the “DreamHost Account Approval Notification!” email.
Follow the email link and put your credentials to find yourself in your Panel.
Setting up your domain
You’ll find yourself in the Overview pane. From here you can follow various links to manage your stuff. Start by clicking the Manage Domains button (Also found in the sidebar under “Domains”)
If you created a new domain in the previous part, you should see it now in the list. Press the “Edit” Button next to the “Delete” button in the middle.
In the next screen the only things you should change are the following
Switch your PHP version to 5.x. PHP 4.x is obsolete and you’ll run into problems with plugins and the like if you keep using it.
Further down where it says “How do you like the www in your URL?” don’t leave it as “both”. Select the “remove www.” as this will help Search engines find you better.
Press “Change fully hosted setting now!” to complete this step.
Installing WordPress
Now that our domain settings are ready, lets go ahead and setup our WordPress installation. Start by heading over to One-Click installs (from the sidebar it’s under “Goodies > One-Click Installs”
Click “Install new software (Advanced Mode)” (Easy mode is similar hosting it on wordpress.com)
Preparing wordpress to be installed
WordPress should be already selected so simply scroll down. You should see an image similar to the screenshot on the left.
In “Install to” you should see your domain. Leave it as it is, unless you want your wordpress site to a subfolder of your domain (ie /blog/). However I don’t recommend this. First because you can later on configure wordpress to show your posts under something like that and secondly because you’ll have to create some kind of splash or home page on your domain root for people falling there. This will probably be different from your site and won’t be counted in your wordpress stats.
In “Select database to use” you should have the option to write your own database name. The default probably will not work so change it to something obvious for you. An example is yourblogname_wp_db
In Hostname, you can just leave it as it is.
In Creating a user for the database, you can simply create the same user as for your ftp access so to cut down on things you have to remember. You’ll probably never use this anyway so it’s easy to forget if you put something new.
Press “Install it for me now”. it will load for a bit and then the page will reload and on the top you should see something similar to this:
Within 5 to 10 minutes, you should receive an email telling you that your installation is ready.
Setting up your WordPress and importing from Blogger
Our Blog Waiting
Now that you’ve received the funky Dreamhost email follow the handy instructions within.
Go to the install link and create your first user.
Login to your site
That’s it. Your first wordpress site is now ready 😉
Lets proceed to import your blogger site now
Go to Import (follow the link in the email or in the admin panel head to “Manage > Import”
Click on Blogger
Click Authorize
Click “Grant Access” in blogger.
You will now see all blogs you are managing in blogspot. Click on the “Import” Magic Button and wait a few seconds to minutes (depending on your old content)
If you’re using feedburner (and if you’re not, why aren’t you?!) go to your feeds, then to your blogger feed, and click “Edit Feed Details”. In the “Original Feed Location” replace your old blogger feed location with the new wordpress one. This is always in the form of http://yourblogurl/feed.
If you’re not using Feedburner, first go and create a feed for your wordpress installation. Then go to your old blogger blog settings > Site Feed. In the “Post Redirect Feed URL” put the new feedburner feed you just created which has your new wordpress feed as its source. This will transparently migrate all your old readers to your new location
Write a new post on your blogspot blog that you have moved and point to your new location. Once we setup your plugin installer, we’ll set up your blog to automatically redirect each post to your new location.
That’s it. You have now successfully migrated from Blogger to WordPress 😉 In a next post I will explain how to migrate Intense Debate Comments as well, since the wordpress importer does not grab those automatically.
There’s one last thing that you might want to do which is to inform your readers that you’ve changed location
Finishing touches
Currently you should have created your wordpress site and migrated from blogger but you are probably at a very basic state. You should at this point configure a few options to make your life and look easier.
Settings
Settings > General
Put a Tagline for your site. This will both be shown on your theme but also probably be seen by search engines as well.
Configure your time so that the times you schedule and post are the ones you expect
Settings > Discussion
Under “Before a Comment Appears”, uncheck “Comment author must have a previously approved comment” This will reduce your management overhead.
Under “Comment Moderation” increase the number of links to 3 since it is not uncommon for a non-spammer to include to links in the same post.
Settings > Permalinks
Here you should set your permalink structure. That is the way your posts will look at your blog. While you can leave it as the default ?p=123, this generally looks ugly, is not rememberable and search engines don’t like it.
Many people select the date based permalinks but I personally do not like that choice. This kind of setup is only appropriate for newspapers really. The only ones who should be using this are the ones who are writing an actual journal.
My advice to you is to use a either a custom structure or a category based one. In a custom structure, you can use the simple /%postname% option which will make all your articles show on the root (ie http://dbzer0.com/this-is-a-post ) or put something in front to make it differ from pages. I prefer /blog/%postname% but it’s up to you.
In a category structure, your posts will show under each category which is nice but if you tag sometimes in more than one category, an article may show under an undesirable one.In any case, whatever you choose does not need to be permanent. Even if you change your permalink structure in the future, wordpress will automatically redirect links going into a post that has changed location correctly so don’t agonize on making the perfect choice now.
Plugins
Plugins are the most exciting part of having your own wordpress installation. I’m not going to go into much depth but I want to mention how to set your installation up to allow you to install and manage plugins from the wordpress admin interface (instead of setting up ftp connections each time). Unfortunately we cannot avoid using FTP the first time.
Use your favorite FTP client to setup a connection to your server. I recommend the excellent fireftp which you can use without installing software on your PC.
Setup your connection in your ftp program of choice. In Fireftp:
Select “New Connection”
Find your webserver name in the
Find your server name. You can find this in multiple locations:
In the automated emails your received
In your dreamhost panel by going to Users > Manage Users and looking at the “Machine” column
At the dreamhost panel, clicking on “Account Status” on the top and looking at “Your Web server”
In server name, put your server name followed by .dreamhost.com (e.g. dodo.dreamhost.com)
In user name, put the user your created for your account
In Password, put the password you created. If you do not remember it, you can change it from Manage Users again by clicking on “Edit”
Press OK.
Connect to your server. You should now be in a folder where your domain exists as a subdirectory. Enter that directory and then navigate to Wp-content > Plugins.
Using your ftp program, upload the plugin directory into your wordpress Plugins directory we navigated before. In Fireftp:
On the left-hand side of the split-screen, navigate to the place where you’ve extracted the zip file.
Make sure that your right screen is showing the contents of youblog.com/wp-content/plugins (you should be seeing other folders and .php files like wp-cache/ and hello.php)
Select the directory and click the little arrow pointing to the right between the split-screens.
Wait until the job is complete.
Go to your plugins admin page (Top right)
Scroll down to where it says “Inactive Plugins” and activate the One-Click Plugin Updater. This will make your plugin page show a little differently. Namely you should see yellow bars next to various plugins.
That’s it. Now you have the ability to install new plugins and themes without using ftp and without even downloading and extracting files on your PC. Just follow the instructions that you can find in the “One Click Updater Miniguide” in your Dashboard.
So that’s it.
Hopefully this guide will help any of you who are thinking about self-hosting but don’t want to trust me or want to learn to do it yourselves.
If you see anything I forgot or something I should include or make simpler, let me know.
In the last two days I’ve been playing Spore which I have, lets say, borrowed from a friend and I must say I quite like it. It’s a pretty addictive game and all pseudo-evolution, make your own monster stuff is cute.
But I’m not going to buy it.
Why? Because the publisher has seriously dropped the ball in regards to what the consumer wants. I was honestly considering bying the game today but then I stumbled onto the reviews of it on Amazon and realised what kind of C.R.A.P. they have in store for me. I will not buy a product who treats me as if I’m a thief already. I will not buy a product which is liable to stop working after I reinstall my machine a few times (and as a techie, this is not that rare). I will not buy a procuct which may stop accepting my activation after a few years. I will not buy a product which uses a copy-protection both known to be disruptive to your machine and taxing on your hardware.
Unless this DRM shit is removed, I am not buying the game. And it seems that most people agree with me on this.
Other than that, there are a few other things that are wrong with the game.
1) Evolution is very misrepresented.
While I understand that the game is mostly meant to be fun, there’s certainly ways you could have made it a bit more realistic. For example, I don’t mind that your creature seems to be growing in real time (especially since in the history view, this is shown as millions of years) but what I didn’t like was that your actions do not affect your evolution at all, other than the generic disposition you have (social vs aggressive, carnivore vs herbivore etc).
However, you actual creature traits have nothing to do with what actions you take. I can start as a carnivore but at any point I can switch to herbivore. I can have 4 spikes and suddenly have 1 big poison gland. I can have 8 limbs and a long body and the next generation can be a little ball with wings.
If nothing more, this seems like the creationist view of evolution where they expect a dog to give birth to a chicken or something similar, as this is exactly how it’s represented in the game. You gather DNA by doing stuff and then you mate and get to redesign your creature. At the this stage, you can pretty much make a totally new thing if you want to.
UPDATE: I think this review adequately explains everything that is wrong with the way evolution is repressented in the game.
2) Some things seem purely cosmetic.
I designed a creature with six legs which was as fast as a creature with one leg. This is because the only thing that matters is what kind of “foot” you have. You can have 10 legs if you want to but it actually hurts you. The only thing that matters is your best type of each limb. Your best hand, your best feet, etc. Multiple eyes don’t make any difference. More than 4 legs or hands are a disadvantage etc.
This is because bonuses don’t stack. You only ever use your best bonus from a specific part. So if you have one set of feet that gives 2 speed, and another that gives 3. Your overall is not 5 but 3. What this means is that there’s no point in getting more than 2 of any item as their bonuses overlap. So some feet give extra speed but less charge, some give jump and some give dance but they all overlap eventually.
There’s also no point in getting the same types of limbs for cosmetic reasons. If I have 3 sets of arms, it is a disadvantage to get all of them as human hands as I will not be getting any extra bonuses.
As a result, your creature ends up as a patchwork of limbs that just give the best bonuses and have no relation to possibly evolve (see part 1 as well).
I don’t really understand why they did this as it would have been very easy to simply allow the stacking of these bonuses. Then there would be a reason to have similar parts. If they also threw in a penalty for switching types (say a penalty from switching from a mouth to a beak) then it would make a bit more sense.
Another thing that bugs me about cosmetic stuff is that all the parts your acquire in the first two stages become irrelevant in the rest. It makes no difference in your abilities if you have 2,3,5 or 6 arms, legs, eyes or whatever. It would be nice if the way each creature was finalized (at the end of stage 2) played some role in the rest of the game.
3) The Creature Stage is too short
By far the creature stage (the 2nd one) is the most interesting as you get to play around with your critter body and limbs and the like. Unfortunately you barely begin to enjoy it when it ends and while you can continue playing in order to gather DNA and the like, there’s no point (unless there is some hidden award in place which I do not know but I imagine there is)
All your body changes (other than speed) become purely cosmetic for subsequent stages of the game.
It would be great if on hard difficulty the DNA rewards were much slower and one had the chance to play around a bit more, get to fight some of the big monsters etc. As it is, I had barely finished migrating one time when I was done and from a previous experience, I knew there was no point in gathering more DNA.
4) Civilization stage is boring
The fourth stage of the game is the Civilization stage which for me was very boring and repetitive. I won’t go much into details in this but basically combat is not really exciting and diplomacy does not exist. It’s best if one just does as much as possible to get past it quickly.
5) It’s not very hard
As an experienced gamer, I found medium difficulty to be very easy and the hard difficulty is barely challenging. If you’re going to make it that easy on hard, at least give us hardcore gamers an “impossible” setting or soemthing so that we can have a bit of fun.
6) No multiplayer
While the game is touted as a massive single-player game, it would be great if they had though of some way to have player interraction. As much fun as it look to be able to trade creatures and buildings with others, the novelty of that will last all of one week. Still, the galactic game seems interesting even though I haven’t managed to play it a lot. However my initial impression is that it might get boring very quickly if it isn’t expanded and the only way this can work is either with user created content or regular updates from the company (like a MMORPG) in the form or new missions, new types of single player experience etc.
Still, for all these things, the game is seriously fun and addictive. I can’t see me playing for too long but I’ve enjoyed it for the last two days. It’s quite fun to make your little critter be as weird as possible and slowly evolve it (realistically) and I’m going to go back and try to make more weird types later on, just for fun.
The creature creator is the best part of the game, as never before have we had so much freedom and fun in creating a new 3D object. What before would take hours of 3D modelling, can now happen in the span of a few minutes.
I truly believe most people will enjoy Spore, even with all its problems but I also believe that it’s not worth bying. Not with horrible DRM restrictions and not with such a low replayability. And if you think I’m being too negative, just check what is going on in the Spore Feedback fora. Perhaps this screenshot will give you some perspective.
Which of the two threads do you think is more popular?
About a week ago I noticed a sudden spike in my Private Hosting memory consumption. And when I say a spike, I mean a spike
Literally within a day I was through the roof and I had absolutely no idea why. I had attributed my previous increase in consumption to a recent traffic increase but a jump like that was ridiculous.
I was fairly certain that this must be a malfunctioning script running somewhere but a quick ps -e didn’t give me any hints. So I turned to Dreamhost support. I fired a quick ticket and got my first reply within 2 days and unfortunately it wasn’t what I wished for.
Basically, the support told me that they cannot know what I am running on my site and thus cannot really help me. I should figure it out myself. Needless to say I was a bit disappointed.
Thanks for the reply Brian but I’m a bit dissapointed. Your reply was basically “we can’t help you. Figure it out yourself” which is a bit of a letdown compared to what I’m used from Dreamhost support.
The thing is, that in the Dreamhost PS information, you mention that 300Mb should be enough for a top 100 blog. I don’t even have a top 100k blog and I do not run any custom code. I run 3 wordpress blogs and 2 galleries and that’s it.
While I can imagine that some plugin is malfunctioning or possibly a site being hacked and running custom code, I’m not an expert on this stuff and without full access it get pretty impossible for me to figure it out.
I can understand that Dreamhost cannot be expected to troubleshoot everyone’s usage, but on the other hand for someone now really knowledgeable this sounds just wrong. From what my point of view, the “usage”, which I cannot verify in any way independently and does not have any visible basis, could just steadily keep increasing to 2000Mb and I couldn’t do anything about it other than just fork out money.
In any case, I’ll see if I can find anything myself
One more day passed and then I had a much better response. Another support person took over and gave me some tips to try as well as some possible command. ps auxe > serverlog
So I gave it a try and, lo and behold, now 4 misbehaving scripts were revealed. One was an instance of my very own complexlife plugin taking up 15% of the ram, while the other 3 where instances of the photodropper plugin, each taking a 10% . Altogether pretty much explained why my usage was so extreme.
So it was time to bring out my good friend –kill– and get me rid of some unruly processes.
Whoop-de-doop, my memory consumption is back to sane levels. This is why it pays to have some good support at your company. I’m happy once more 😀
You could have been so much more America. You could have become a land of great culture, where the free exchange of ideas and created a rich culture of new and interesting art. Instead your copyrights and your intellectual properties have created a culture where the thing it is known for is shallow sensationalism only fit for mass consumption.
You could have been so much more America ((Note that for the purpose of this post, by “America”, I mean U.S.A)). You could have become a land of great culture, where the free exchange of ideas and created a rich culture of new and interesting art. Instead your copyrights and your intellectual properties have created a culture where the thing it is known for is shallow sensationalism only fit for mass consumption.
You could have been so much more America. You could have become a shining bastion of science and progress where the greatest minds in the world moved in to so that they could have the chance to express and create. Instead you are drowning in the murky pool of fundamentalism and new-age mysticism. A large part of your population is actively opposed to knowledge..
You could have been so much more America. You could have used one of the greatest and more progressive constitutions to become the Democracy everyone wants to imitate and thus change the world by example. Instead you have tried to change the world by using your power to create brutal dictators again and again and again, and then topple them when they don’t turn up to be the willing pawns you expected.
You could have been so much more America. You could have used your extraordinary wealth to extinguish poverty and suffering in your society. Instead you are trying so hard to dismantle and prevent any social security and now your poorer people have to live in fear of a sudden illness that might leave them bankrupt. Instead of taking money from the filthy rich and bettering the lives of the poor, you have taken the money from everyone under the guise of foreign aid and siphoned it to the filthy rich.
You could have been so much more America. Yours could have been the land of the truly free, but instead you are the nation of the deluded. You have exchanged away your freedoms for a false sense of security and thus deserve neither.
You could have been so much more America. You could be loved by the whole world for your status, your example or your culture. Instead practically the whole world despises your blatant imperialism, you disregard for conventions and your gun-ho attitude.
You could have been so much more America. You could have the first culture to break free from taboos where the human body is not shunned and sexuality or any orientation is not feared. Instead your puritanical culture goes into bugfuck crazy mode at the mere sight of a nipple.
You could have been so much more America. With mere billions of dollars, if not millions, you could have gone totally energy independent and helped retain our planets survivability. Instead you have wasted trillions fighting a needless war that only serves to make your corporations richer and destabilize whole countries. You have fought for the all-mighty black gold with total disregard of the rest of the world.
You could have been so much more America. You could have given the example of a just and honourable civilization acting responsibly to make the world a better place. Instead you are known as the irresponsible bully who tries to play world police, even though nobody wants you to.
You could have been so much more but you blew it America, and now your time has passed. Soon nobody is going to want to play with you anymore.
So, Barefoot bum’s new shiny, wordpress-powered self-hosted blog is now ready. I’ve finally finished with all the imports and the thing is ready to use. Of course the layout might change if Larry wishes but the thing is ready to be used.
Here’s a step-by-step summary of the setup process, just to get an overview of what was required. Keep in mind that for a new blog, you don’t need more than 10 or so of these.
Day 1
Setup the domain to use php5 and not to use the needless www. prefix.
Use One-click install to setup wordpress and wait 5 minutes.
Acticate the plugin Wp-Super Cache (Installed with wordpress).
Delete all other plugins except Akismet and Hello Dolly (Just in case he likes it).
Go to Settings > General and copy the blog desc from the original blog.
In Settings, Go to Writing and add http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/ to the ping so that the Atheist Blogroll is pinged.
In Settings, Went to Discussion and deactivated the option to require one approved comment before posting it. Increased the number of links before moderation to 3.
Updated the admin password to a temp password from the default of WP.
Added a new admin user for me and Larry and deleted the default admin to avoid 0-day attacks.
Went Manage > Import > Blogger. Sent email to Larry to authorize wordpress for his blogger account.
Downloading some themes closer to the original blog style.
Larry started the import procedure. It finished in about 10 minutes for 1200+ posts and 3000+ comments.
Total time to setup all these, from start to finish, while also doing other stuff (like chatting on ICQ and reading blogs): 5 hours.
Day 2
Finally received some help from Intense Debate on how to import IDC comments from blogspot to WordPress. I got a plugin which automates this in the mail.
Plugin did not work as my host does not support a php function for security reasons.
Contacted the Josh Fraser, the author of the plugin for help. He was amazingly responsive and helpful and provided me with an updated version of the plugin that could work around the php restriction. Josh you rock!
Import went perfectly and all comments were back into wordpress. Unfortunately one post did not get them as the title has italics which wordpress stripped and they names did not match. Nevertheless, the rest worked. (I will do a follow-up post on this later)
Total time for this part: 1 hour.
Thoughts
Of course this process was a learning experience for me as not only did Larry have a pretty customized blog with widgets, images, etc) but he is also subscibed to a lot of services I do not have access (Feeburner, Scoutle, etc). Finally this was the first time I was trying to migrate ID comments from blogger to wordpress sso this took some extra research as well.
For someone who has a very simple and uncustomized blog, the migration time can be cut to 1/3 easily.
Nevertheless, this first experience will now allow me to know what I need and streamline the process. Specifically, there is the issue that I cannot setup a lot of stuff without access to one’s accounts, while other times I may need feedback.
This is the stuff I need to know in order to bug people less:
Feedburner password: In order to setup your blogspot feed to redirected to your new blog
WordPress.com password or API: So that I can setup your stats
Blogger password and username: So that I can start the import process and see the codes for any widgets you have on your sidebar (Mybloglog, scoutle etc)
If the codes are not visible through the blogger gadgets, I need to have them so that I can put them in the sidebar.
How do you want your tags and categories? As blogger only supports the generic “labels” which gets translated to wordpress categories, I need to know which ones (if any) to turn into tags
How do you want your permalink structure to be? By date (as in blogger, like a newspaper), with categories? with a custom text (like here under /blog/ ?)
All of these are information that I will need to set it up with the minimum of input from you. If any of these is missing, unfortunately I will have to ask you or you do it yourself (for the last two options I can just make a choice myself which you can change later on).
All in all, it went quite well and nothing horribly broke. So I’m quite glad. This will go much faster for someone with a more simple blog (as in, one hosted in wordpress.com, or not very customized blogspot)
I’m only a bit saddened that Larry chose not to start using it yet. If he keeps using his old blog, new comments and posts will be more difficult to transfer over as it cannot be done as part of a mass import.
Seriously US. Americans, what the fuck is wrong with you? Don’t you see what is going on around you? Raiding homes of non-criminals for trumpted up charges of “planning to riot”? Arresting and beating up reporters?
Have you learned nothing at all from history?
These are the leading steps to fascism people. This is how totalitarianism comes about. It does not suddently appear one day and gives you a fair chance to fight it off with your 2nd ammendment rights. It creeps insidiously, slowly eroding your freedoms and hoping your will do nothing.
And nothing you did.
Where were you when people’s homes were raided? What were the neighbours doing when police & army were marching and singing military songs in the middle of the neighborhood as if you had a goddamn military law in effect. They did nothing. If all the people in the neighborhood came out of their homes and opposed what your government did to your felow US Americans, perhaps this day would not have been so dark.
But they were cowering at their homes, or having a schadenfreude at the expense of the “hippies”.
“In America, they came first for the hippies, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a hippie;
And then they came for the immigrants, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t an immigrant;
And then they came for the Atheists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t an Atheist;
And then . . . they came for me . . . And by that time there was no one left to speak up.”
Some of you may think that it’s just the government attempting to silence their critics forcefully. Some of you may think that since this can never be achieved with the distributed way of information, that you are safe.
But this is not what they want to achieve.
They want to scare you. They want you to leave in fear that at any point they will be able to barge into your home, manhandle you and take your possetions. They want to show you how none of your copatriots will raise a hand to help you. They want you to bask in fear so that you’re too afraid to speak.
And when the first “accident” happens, you will be.
So keep doing nothing US Americans. Keep doing nothing and see what happens.
The Barefoot Bum has accepted my offer. I now have my first…guinea pig 🙂
That was quick 😀
So I’ve now started setting up the Larry’s new home. I will attempt to log and blog my progress to that hopefully others who might want to follow, but doing this themselves might be able to do so.
Stay tuned 😉
As for the others, I still haven’t heard from Alonzo and unfortunately Vjack is preoccupied with Hurricanes and the like so it’s not really feasible for him at this point (and best of luck to him). In any case, I have some time until I’m finished with the Barefoot Bum.
PS: Fuck, I now need a new category to post these types of blogposts under.
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