Jonesblog – iBlog and WordPress
I recently completed the migration, redesign, and setup of a new blog of a good friend of mine, Bryan Jones. Bryan had been running on one of the first blogging platforms, iBlog. The concept behind iBlog is fairly simple – organize the data and posts in flat files locally, and create flat HTML files for the web-viewable content. The elegance and simplicity of iBlog helped in several ways – portability and performance. Obviously, flat HTML files are served faster than interpreted/dynamic PHP pages. These benefits aside, iBlog had several flaws which eventually thrust it toward become abandonware.
The software wasn’t capable of handling comments within the same system, due to the static nature of the pages. Many iBlog users resorted to using solutions like Haloscan, an offsite third party which provided commenting functionality. The other flaw I noticed was limited flexibility in the department of look-and-feel of the blog, without having to rebuild each and every HTML file – dynamic websites are exceptionally flexible when it comes to situations like this. The development of the software also ceased, as the developer seemed to fall off the face of the earth.
It was time for a change, and Bryan decided to go with WordPress. After seeing other blog engines/CMS’s, WordPress was the obvious choice. The biggest issue at hand was how to get the data from his iBlog website to the WordPress version. There were two options that were available on the web – Agitprop and AppleScript. Agitprop was a utility created to export iBlog content into Movable Type export files, and the AppleScript solution was intended to create WordPress export/import files, though it miserably failed. Having known that WordPress has a fantastic import function for several blog formats including Movable Type and Blogger, I went the Agitprop route. After exporting the content and images I ran into a problem – WordPress didn’t like the Movable Type export file and only imported the first entry. After contemplating numerous solutions and attempting them, I settled on a fun project – using Python to parse the Agitprop/MT export and turn it into a valid WordPress WXR file. Several hundred lines of Python parsing and generating code later, a functional WordPress WXR file was created, allowing the data to be migrated into the new database-driven WordPress blog.
After cleaning up a few snags here and there, Jonesblog was fully imported into WordPress. The remaining issues at hand were the theme of the blog, and URL redirection from the old iBlog URLs. The first was a piece of cake. Diving into the Carrington WordPress theme framework, I created a clean and minimalistic look for Jonesblog – exactly what Bryan was after (success!). The difficult part came in finding a way to connect the old iBlog URLs to WordPress. Jeff McGrath‘s assistance came in incredibly useful here, as he caught onto a tidbit of information that gave me a glimmer of hope that I wouldn’t have to manually rewrite 545 blog entry URLs. iBlog used an interesting format for generating URL structures:
http://example.com/C12345689/E20100522014385/index.html
The first subdirectory is the category, stored in some unique ID. These ID’s could be mapped to WordPress category names using a dictionary/Array. The remaining subdirectory, as pointed out by Jeff, was a UNIX timestamp preceded by the letter E to designate “entry.” After a few attempts at mapping the dates in the URL to WordPress’ post dates, I discovered that iBlog’s naming convention was frustratingly inconsistent. The decoding of these URLs only worked for about 20% of the blog entries – not nearly enough to justify using it. Manually, I added the old URL’s to each post as a custom field, which would allow me to search the WordPress database to find the post that was being requested.
After some Regex and .htaccess magic, the old URLs were rewritten using Apache’s mod_rewrite to the new locations. This was my first experience working with an OS X webserver, and it was an interesting one. You can check out the (nearly) final product at http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/.
Blogger FTP to WordPress How-To
With Blogger killing their FTP publishing service, many bloggers are moving platforms to WordPress, an open source PHP-powered blogging platform available on a plethora of hosts. If you’re not sure if your host supports WordPress, ask them if they support PHP and MySQL. If both of those are supported, you’re in luck.
WordPress Setup
WordPress is dead simple to install and setup. Many hosts use Fantastico or similar software to do a one-click install. If you’re not on a host that does a one-click install, you’re not missing much. WordPress has a famous 5-minute install and fantastic instructions on how to do it. Information you’ll need prior to doing this is:
- FTP credentials to upload the WordPress files, as well as the FTP address of your server/host
- MySQL credentials – database host, database name, database user, and database password
Once you’ve got these, read the WordPress setup documentation. It’s easy.
Migrating Content
Once your WordPress install is up and running, you need to migrate your data from Blogger to WordPress. In the “tools” section of WordPress’ sidebar, open the “import” tool and select “Blogger”.
From there, WordPress will ask for your Blogger credentials to authorize you to retrieve the data. Follow the wizard and WordPress should import all of your comments and posts that exist in the Blogger system. In my case, I didn’t have any Blogger comments as this was just a test blog from a university class of mine.
After importing:
After importing the content, WordPress will ask for a user to associate the posts with. I just use my main user, but you can set it to be any user you’ve previously created. Once you’ve finished that, you’re set to start looking for a theme, or hiring a designer to create a custom theme just for you (wink, wink).
How do I keep my permalinks the same?
This is probably the biggest concern of people migrating from Blogger to WP. Fortunately, there are two good approaches to making sure your links still work. Firstly, WordPress allows you to set a custom permalink scheme. The best I’ve seen for Blogger-style URLs is ‘/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html’. That text between the quotes needs to be put into the ‘custom structure’ for permalinks. While this will be really close to perfect, WordPress evidently drops words like “the” out of permalinks, so you may need to go in and individually edit post slugs/URL’s to get them exactly how they’re needed.
Secondly, I’d recommend the Google XML Sitemaps plugin. It notifies Google of your new site structure and automatically tells Google to rescrape your site when you create a new post or page.
Feel free to leave questions, comments, or corrections in the comments, or contact me.
Blogger to WordPress Migration – Leggnet’s Digital Capture
As many Blogger users probably know, Google (who run Blogger) are deprecating their FTP blogging service. What this means for users is that they will no longer be able to update FTP-hosted websites powered by Blogger as of May 1st (the deadline was initially March 26th, but has been pushed back). Many Blogger users are choosing to switch to WordPress as a result. WordPress provides simple migration tools, importing all of your blogs, labels and comments. The ability to do this makes WordPress a great alternative to the options Google is giving Blogger users as an alternative.
WordPress is a very power blogging platform, and also works very well as a content management system for websites that aren’t blogs. Anesti Creative recently migrated Salt Lake City based photographer Rich Legg from Blogger FTP to his self-hosted WordPress installation. The transition was nearly seamless and took less than a day to complete, thanks to WordPress’s exceptional import tools. Rich Legg chose to migrate all of his content over, but what about your theme or design? Anesti Creative rebuilt Rich’s heavily modified Blogger theme to work in WordPress. The new WordPress design is more flexible, and easier to manage from an end-user standpoint. That being said, WordPress provides thousands of exceptional themes that often times are major improvements over the default Blogger themes.
Can you tell which template is the WordPress and which is the Blogger? There’s a subtle style difference between the two.
Creating an Online Presence – Part 2
In the first post in the series “Creating an Online Presence,” I addressed how you can start building an internet presence for your company, organization, or even just for yourself. If you haven’t read that post yet, you should.
If you have a spare computer lying around, you can setup a web server running any OS, but I recommend Ubuntu for beginners. I’d recomend using the desktop edition if you’re not knowledgeable with Linux, and the server edition if you know how to do everything via the command line.
If you’re going the “run your own server” route, you’ll want to use ZoneEdit to manage your DNS. There are several options for updating your domain name IP, all demonstrated on the ZoneEdit site.
After you have a domain name, DNS, and hosting, you can start building a website for users to see. Generally speaking, there are two approaches to building a website – dynamic and static. Static websites are easy to create, but become a lot more work as you add more pages and content to your website. This requires building each entire page in separate HTML files. If you change a link or design, you have to change every single page. Dynamic websites, however, remove the need for per-page changes for design or link changes. Dynamic websites utilize a template system, where the look and design of a page is pre-defined, but the content is allowed to be dynamic or fluid. Most websites that are dynamic are powered by a Content Management System (CMS). Below are some popular CMS’s and what their strengths are.
- WordPress – Open source CMS commonly used for blogging, but can be used for other kinds of sites. Anesti Creative runs on WordPress. Thousands of plugins and themes. Great for beginners.
- Drupal – General purpose open source CMS, very powerful, especially when used with plugins. Quite robust. The White House website runs on Drupal. Good for more experienced users.
- Joomla – Open source CMS, quite configurable, but the interface is quite cluttered and has a considerably more steep learning curve. Tons of extensions.
Anesti Creative mainly uses WordPress and Drupal, and for good reason. They’re simple, easy to use, easy to set up, easy to configure, have tons of add-ons/plugins. Joomla is full of features, but the administration interface is very cluttered and difficult to use from the get-go. WordPress benefits from being one of the most-used CMS’s. Security holes in WordPress are quickly patched, and easily updated from the admin interface with the click of a button.
Check back for Part 3 of the “Creating an Online Presence” series where I’ll discuss my favorite add-ons for WordPress and Drupal. If you think I missed anything or have a correction, leave a comment below. I’m open to suggestions on new platforms to use. If you’ve got any questions, the comments are a great way to ask for some help.
Creating an Online Presence – Part 1
People with lesser “web” experience often don’t know where to start in setting up a website. Many people don’t know how easy it can be to buy a domain, get web hosting, e-mail, or what software to use. In this series of posts, I’ll be discussing the best websites/tools to use.
The first step in getting your message or website online is to register a domain name. Finding a good domain name can be quite difficult, as there are thousands of domains being “squatted” – used to advertising purposes or to sell the domain at an exuberant price. I’d advise against buying a domain from someone doing this – their costs are often in the high thousands, if not more.
So how do you find a good domain name? I like to start with an excellent website called BustAName. The site allows you to input keywords and potential domain names you have in mind, and will tell you which are available, and even provides a link to domain name registrars.
Registering the domain name is the next step. You can choose from any number of registrars – GoDaddy, NetworkSolutions, DreamHost, and many more. While all of these services are fantastic, the one I recommend isn’t on that list and it may surprise you. My registrar of choice is none other than the internet giant Google. Registering with the Mountain View technology giant has its perks – Google Apps, customized for your domain being the biggest. Their domains cost you $10 a year, automatically billed to you so your domain shouldn’t expire. This provides you with an excellent web mail interface with 7GB of space – just like GMail. Also included is GCal, GDocs, and Google Sites – the latter being a way you could build a community-based site easily.
Many registrars, like DreamHost and GoDaddy also offer hosting packages with their domain names. Google’s allows you to use Google Sites – a simple, easy to use way to build your site without having to fuss with an extra hosting bill. However, if you want to create something outside of Google’s templates, you’re best served going with hosting. A webhost I’ve found to be quite excellent is NearlyFreeSpeech. They only charge you for what you use. You can calculate how much their hosting will cost by using their calculator.
Check back for Part 2 where I’ll discuss the different options for DNS and even how you can get free hosting if you have a spare computer lying around.