Tag: mastermaq

Notes for 2/10/2008

Here are my weekly notes:

  • XML is ten years old today! That strikes me as being not very long. Seems like XML has been around forever. Time flies when you’re having <fun>?
  • Apparently Yahoo is talking to AOL. They must be really desperate to avoid Microsoft.
  • Apple has updated their trademark to encompass gaming. Is an Apple console on the way?
  • I ran into some problems with WordPress and email notifications again this week. I found the WP Mail SMTP plugin, and so far it was been working wonderfully. Give that a try if you’re hosting WP on IIS.
  • An Economist piece on the cable cutting that happened recently.
  • Valentine’s Day is this week! For my fellow coffee lovers: check out this open thread at the Starbucks Gossip blog. Love-related stories at Starbucks.
  • Did some work on migrating my Dad’s two blogs to WordPress, and I’d say it’s going well. Should be done for the weekend.
  • From the New York Times: Is Obama a Mac and Clinton a PC?
  • Speaking of the election…Obama swept the weekend, prompting the Clinton campaign to make changes. Clinton still leads slightly in delegates, however.

Notes for 2/3/2008

Here are my weekly notes:

Can you believe it’s already February? Don’t forget that 2008 is a leap year, so there are 29 days this month.

What's new around here?

mlogo I’m so happy that I’ve made the switch to WordPress! It’s a great platform with a great community. One of the best things about WordPress is the gigantic list of available plugins. If I wanted to add a feature to my blog in Community Server, it was always incredibly difficult to do. With WordPress however, the feature has likely already been written by someone else!

I thought I’d take a moment to share with you some of these features.

  1. Comments rock! One of the biggest complaints my readers had about the old blog was that it never remembered their details on the comment form. I hated that too. That’s no longer an issue with WordPress. But wait, it gets better! I installed the Subscribe to Comments plugin, which means you can check a box when you leave a comment and you’ll get email notifications of all follow-up comments!
  2. Twitter! I displayed my Twitter status on my old blog, but I wrote the code to do it myself. I probably re-wrote it half a dozen times too. Anyway, I installed the Twitter Widget, and it rocks. Nice and simple to use. And best of all, when Twitter goes down, I can just deactivate the plugin – no code changes required!
  3. Collapsible Archives! I’ve been blogging since November 2003, which makes for an incredibly long list of monthly archives. With the old design I had everything contracted by default, but I didn’t really like that. Now I have the Flexo Archives Widget, which shows just the years. Click on a year, and it expands to show the months. Very cool!
  4. Tag Cloud! I’m a big fan of tag clouds, and I’m really happy that WordPress 2.3 includes this functionality right outta the box.
  5. AddThis! On every post is a button that lets you save the link to your favorite service. On the sidebar is a button that enables you to subscribe at your favorite service. This kind of functionality should be included on all blogs I think! I’m using plugins from AddThis.

And some non-WordPress things:

  • A wider page layout! I also made the font size a bit bigger.
  • I am quite happy with the way my icon bar turned out! Click on the icons to access my profiles around the web.

If you’re reading this in an aggregator of some kind, I apologize for the multiple items you likely saw in my feed! Should only be a one-time thing. The feed address shouldn’t need to change, however.

Thanks for reading! If you have any feedback, please let me know!

Community Server to WordPress: Part 2

WordPress Okay, time for another update on the blog migration. I stopped keeping track of hours, but I would guess I’ve spent about 9 hours or so on it thus far. Part of that time is for the theme though, and I tend to take quite a while working on those.

Here’s what I’ve accomplished since part 1:

  • Discovered that extracting the tags from existing posts was harder than I first thought! That’s because I’ve used three or four different styles for including tags over the years, so I had to update the code to take that into account.
  • Same problem affected the “Read” link at the bottom of a post.
  • Ran into a bunch of crap data problems in Community Server, mainly around trackbacks and and spam comments. For some reason they were appearing to me as posts. I solved the problem by deleting them in the source where appropriate, and accounting for them in the code otherwise.
  • Another crap data issue – one post had four entries!
  • Implemented and tested the redirection code necessary so that existing links will continue to work. I think this part is really interesting because I’ve basically got PHP and ASP.NET running in the same application.
  • Spent some time working on the theme, which you can see at the test blog. It looks more or less the same as this theme, but with some nice improvements.
  • Also spent some time looking into plugins and activated a few.

After some trial and error, I was finally able to import all the content from Community Server to WordPress successfully. Yay!

I didn’t start tagging posts until early 2005, so there’s around 400 or so that aren’t tagged, but even still I think the tag cloud on the test blog is really interesting. Looks like I blog about Microsoft quite a bit! Maybe even more interesting is the fact that I’ve used 1843 different tags.

So I guess I’m about ready to make the switch. Just a few more “clean up” things I need to do (like delete more spam comments). I think I’m going to replace my website with another WordPress installation too, but that shouldn’t take long. The current site is really old, based on ugly code, and it’s mostly out-of-date because updating the pages is so difficult. I think WP will work nicely (plus I can use the same theme).

I’d say the migration is going much more smoothly than I anticipated!

Notes for 1/27/2008

Here are my weekly notes:

Community Server to WordPress: Part 1

Post Image Back in July I mentioned that I wanted to switch to WordPress. Obviously I haven’t completed that yet, but I have started on it! So far I’ve spent about three and a half hours on the project, and it’s going well. You can see my test blog here.

It’s a difficult migration, for a number of reasons. Firstly, I am on Community Server 1.1 which has been pretty much abandoned. I have no desire to upgrade to a newer version – I’m trying to get rid of CS, after all. Secondly, I want to take advantage of the built-in tags that WordPress 2.3 has, among other things. In my current blog, the tags are actually part of the post content. Thirdly, I don’t want any links to break! So there’s a number of things to worry about.

Here’s what I’ve done so far:

  • Installed a test instance of WordPress 2.3.2.
  • Created a solution in Visual Studio 2008 with three projects: a WordPress data access layer (DAL), a Community Server DAL, and a command line app.
  • Configured SubSonic to automatically generate the two DALs.
  • Wrote some static functions to: extract the tags from my existing posts, remove the footer and reformat the link I sometimes have there, generate a slug for WordPress posts (the words in the link), and build the existing and new URLs for a post.
  • Started implementing the command line app to read a post from CS, apply all of the necessary transformations with the static functions, and then add it to WordPress.

For the most part it’s working well! I’m still tweaking the code a bit to deal with oddball posts, but it’s more or less ready to go. You can see on the test blog that I’ve started testing the code. I think the actual migration will take quite a while, considering I have almost 2000 posts and 5000 comments.

After the migration, I still need to work on a theme, and I need to ensure all the links are redirecting correctly. So there’s quite a bit of work to do, but I think the hardest stuff is out of the way. My goal is to have it all rockin and rollin by Northern Voice.

Notes for 1/20/2008

Here are my weekly notes:

  • Last night Megan and I went to see Disney’s Beauty and the Beast at The Citadel. It was the very first night (a preview night, opening night is Tuesday) and while there were some technical difficulties, it was still a great show. It makes me want to crack out the old VHS and watch it! I especially enjoyed "Be Our Guest".
  • Went out to Violino for Annie’s Birthday on Friday night…it was yummy! Oh and the U of A president was dining a few tables away from us. Some photos are here.
  • I’ve been playing around with Buxfer this weekend, and I think it may be a winner! Buxfer is a personal finance app that helps you track your money. Just like Remember The Milk, I can access Buxfer in a variety of ways: on the web, via email, via Twitter, and on the iPhone/iPod touch. I think that’s what makes it extremely useful for me. Even better is this – I submitted a suggestion this afternoon, and received a personalized response a few hours later. Awesome customer service!
  • Speaking of iPod/iPhone, you’ve gotta check this site out. It lets you use a custom image for adding bookmarks to the home screen in 1.1.3. Hat tip to darylcognito.
  • Tried Fatburger on Tuesday evening. I noticed it in South Edmonton Common a few weeks ago and was curious. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t anything special either. Kinda cool how they call out the order like they do in Starbucks.
  • For the .NET developers in the crowd – I’ve been using SubSonic a lot lately, and I just love it. Rob Conery has two posts up sharing some of what’s coming in the next version.
  • Liveblogging of major events is becoming increasingly more common. Macworld was liveblogged by a ton of sites this past week. I guess it should be no surprise that people are developing software specifically for liveblogging, such as CoverItLive.

Some photos from the past week:

Fatburger Me with Stanley Sharon and I Annie!

Notes for 1/13/2008

Here are my weekly notes:

  • Went to see the movie Juno last night, and loved it! Ellen Page is such a great actress. Highly recommended.
  • I picked up my new camera this week. I decided, once again, on the Canon SD870 IS. That 3 inch LCD is just so beautiful!
  • Perhaps the biggest tech story of the week was Gizmodogate. Personally, I think what Gizmodo did was crap. That’s why I read Engadget 😉
  • Torrent site Mininova has turned three years old! They had a heck of a year, and I can’t wait to see what they come up with next.
  • A 41 year old blogger in China was beaten to death this week by government officials for attempting to film a confrontation with villagers using his cell phone. One official has been fired so far, and the investigation is ongoing.
  • Via Larry Borsato I learned of the Facebook group started by some Tim Horton’s employees that attempts to teach customers the "rules" for ordering. Larry points out that Starbucks understands the importance of making every experience a great one. Just this week one of the two drinks I ordered during a trip to Starbucks was missed, so the barista gave me a coupon for a free one. At Tim Horton’s, would I have been berated for ordering incorrectly?
  • There’s a good series of posts at River City Writer covering Reasons to Leave Edmonton. Definitely worth a read (and some thought). You may also be interested in my Why not move to Edmonton? post from July.
  • Believe it or not, employees of Amazon.com currently work in offices scattered all around Seattle. It’ll be another two years before they are all in the same place, a new $1.5 billion complex the company is building.
  • I really wish I could order coffee at Starbucks like this.

There has been a ton of discussion this week about podcasting, mostly as a result of this post at Mashable. I haven’t written anything about it yet, but I will. I’ve been collecting articles and giving it some thought.

Notes for 1/6/2008

Let me begin with a quote from The Matrix Reloaded. Neo uses the word "hope" just before exiting through the door on his left, prompting The Architect to say:

Hope, it is the quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of your greatest strength, and your greatest weakness.

Think about that when you get all excited for Barack Obama and his platform of hope.

Here are my weekly notes:

Notes for 12/30/2007

I haven’t done one of these posts in a while…too much travelling! I head back to Edmonton tomorrow. Here are my weekly notes:

Here’s an excerpt from a post by Dave Winer that will definitely make you think:

With all possible humility, I’d like to tell you that a few days after I die my entire web presence will likely disappear. My servers require some attention from me from time to time. The first time that happens, poof, there goes 10-plus years of Scripting News, and all the docs for the OPML Editor and the OPML spec, the XML-RPC site, to name just a few. Anyway, within a couple of months it will all certainly disappear, unless someone pays my hosting and DSL bills. Maybe someone will, but isn’t it ridiculous that that’s what it depends on?

Rhetorical, but I’ll answer anyway. Yes, it is ridiculous. What do we do about it? Not sure, but it’s an interesting problem that many people will work on. And the solution probably won’t be easy.