Archive for the 'Technology' Category

Successfully imported Wordpress 2.7 into Joomla 1.5

Published
by
Chalupa
on July 30, 2009
in Advice, Joomla, Nerdy/Geeky and Wordpress
. 0 Comments

In my last post, I exported mojoBlog to Wordpress, I successfully got mojoBlog converted into Wordpress and then exported Wordpress into an XML file.  Following the instructions from http://www.daydreymer.com/index.php/Technical/Tools/wordpress-export-to-joomla/All-Pages.html, I was then able to take that XML file and convert it into an SQL file to import into my Joomla 1.5 database.

Here are a few hiccups along the way that might help you out if you’re trying this.

  • Make sure you setup your Section/Category where you want all your blog posts to reside in Joomla.  The SQL generator has a place where you can enter the Section/Category IDs.  I did not do this the first time and all of a sudden I had 385 orphaned articles in Joomla.
  • When importing my SQL file into my database through PHPMYADMIN, uploading the file didn’t work, but if I copied/pasted the file into the textbox that seemed to work just fine.
  • Lastly, I was receiving a really weird error when trying to import in my database.  Turns out there was some weird javascript inside a particular blog post that was screwing everything up.  I was able to just edit the SQL file and remove the javascript code.

I’m not sure if I could be much help to your particular situation, but feel free to leave a comment if you’re having some problems and I can try.  I don’t know how many people are using mojoBlog, but the support seems to have dried up and it’s been over a year since version 0.17 was supposed to be released.  If I were you, I’d move your mojoBlog to Wordpress, if not Joomla.  Getting mojoBlog migrated to something else will allow me to update my Joomla 1.012 site to Joomla 1.5.  If you haven’t seen the new version, you’re in for a surprise.  Things are much, much better than they were before.

I’m continuing to post to my mojoBlog blog and need to figure out a few more things before I can migrate everything.  I still working on figuring out how to import my comments.  Supposedly !JoomlaComment can do that.  That’s my next project.

Think I’m sticking with Joomla

Published
by
Chalupa
on July 30, 2009
in Joomla, Nerdy/Geeky and Wordpress
. 0 Comments

For the past two days I’ve been trying to work out exactly how I could move my Joomla site over to Wordpress.  It was going to be complicated.  Even after I figured out how to export my mojoBlog content, move all of my Joomla content into WP categories, acquire a menu system to mimic the old site, and import the users….I was still left with the SEF stuff.

This may not seem like too big of a deal, but I’ve spent the past two years trying to make a web site people want to come to and have acquired a Google Rating of 4.  I’m pretty proud of that and am not looking forward to losing that.  I know there are plugins that could help, but the truth is I know I wouldn’t be able to figure out all the redirects.  I have over 400 content items without even considering the blog, not to mention all of the internal links withing those content items.

After talking it over with Soulman, he sold me on upgrading to Joomla 1.5.  Everything on that site works wonderfully except for the blog.  He helped me to consider a few blogging options, both free and not-free, and I’ve been working out the details.  I should be able to port all of my mojoBlog items into Joomla core content and I think I’ve found a way to export all the comments.  I think I can tie the comments to the posts, but I haven’t tested it yet.  Other than a couple of tiny other hurdles that should be behind me soon, there isn’t too much more to figure out.  Looks like I’m going to stick with Joomla on this one guys.

Edit: Turns out every tool, I have found, that used to be able to import Wordpress content into Joomla doesn’t exist or doesn’t work anymore.  If you have any leads on something that will accomplish this, I’d love to hear it.

Exporting mojoblog

Published
by
Chalupa
on July 29, 2009
in Joomla and Wordpress
. 0 Comments

So this is turning out to be more and more complicated.  I knew mojoBlog is a stripped down version of Wordpress, but didn’t realize how stripped down.  It has no export function.

I think what I’ll have to do is export the tables, move the files, and then do a standard Wordpress upgrade.  This doesn’t sound too bad except the tables are bigger than 2MB so I can’t do the standard upload using phpmyadmin.  They cap file sizes.  I could try a few tables at a time, but I think most of it is all in one table which is over 2MB by itself.  I’ll figure it out.  Just trying to be careful and test things before I start messing around with actual data.

Joomla to Wordpress

Published
by
Chalupa
on July 29, 2009
in Joomla, Nerdy/Geeky and Wordpress
. 2 Comments

I’ve had a Joomla site running for a little over 2 years now.  What started off as just a content-based site gradually turned into a content site with a blog which then morphed into a heavily updated blog with some content.  If you’ve used Joomla, you know it’s hard to get decent blog tools without paying any money.  Being a fan of Wordpress, I settled on mojoBlog shortly before the developer stopped having time to work on it.  It’s a great, little stripped-down version of Wordpress, but it’s also full of bugs and just doesn’t quite do what I want.

Lately I’ve been kicking around the idea of exporting everything to Wordpress.  I can’t upgrade to Joomla 1.5 because mojoBlog won’t work.  If I did upgrade to 1.5 I would have to pay some money to get the blog setup and running again.  Last night I found an importer/exporter that will take Joomla content items and bring them into Wordpress 2.7.  I know that’s not the most recent version, but it’s easy to upgrade from there.  The hardest part was finding an old installation file.

From there, I just need to figure out how to tweak the template so things display how I want, import users, and figure a way to keep my permalinks.  I’ve found a few plugins that I think will be very helpful both in menu style, user roles, and multiple permalink formats.  As I’m testing these out and finding things I want to use, I’ll report back with what I’ve found and what works.

Self reference doesn’t match document location

Published
by
Chalupa
on June 21, 2009
in Advice, Nerdy/Geeky and RSS
. 6 Comments

<atom10:link xmlns:atom10="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" rel="self" href="http://mysite.com/feed" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/mysite.com');" type="application/rss+xml" /><item>

If you have ever ran your RSS feed through a feed validator and received the message: “Self reference doesn’t match document location” and have no idea what that means, I may have a few tips for you.

While this is just a recommendation and not an error, it could still cause you problems depending on how you’re using your feed.  I host my RSS feed on my own site, run it through FeedBurner and then distribute the feed to different sites for distribution.  One of those places has been having problems with my feed lately and I’ve had this recommendation showing up after trying to validate it through http://feedvalidator.org.

I didn’t think it was worth worrying about, but I recently fixed it just to make sure it wasn’t causing any problems.  It took me a while to figure it out, but it’s basically a self-referencing link.  If for any reason the URL of your feed does not exactly match this, you’ll get the “recommendation” message.

  • The first thing to check is to make sure that link is the URL people use for your feed.  If you’re doing fancy HTTP or .htaccess redirects, you should be giving people the destination URL, not the one that redirects them to something else.
  • The next thing to check for are spaces in your URL.  Even though some operating systems allow spaces in file names, it’s a general practice to try and avoid them.  Try using dashes or hyphens.
  • The last thing to remember is your links are case-sensitive.  If you’re sending someone to http://mysite.com/feed but your RSS feed references itself as http://mysite.com/Feed, you’re going to get the “error” message when you try to validate your RSS feed.  The hard part can be tracking down where this is set,  depending on how your feed is created and how you’re manipulating it.

I hope these few tips can help you out.  Generally it’s hard to find any help when looking around for an answer to a question like this.

Joomla + MojoBlog + Google Search

Published
by
Chalupa
on March 22, 2009
in Blogging, Joomla and Nerdy/Geeky
. 4 Comments

I have a Joomla 1.0 site and use mojoBlog.  It’s been working out pretty well with the exception of SEF URLs and searching.  I know this is because mojoBlog is a component and isn’t well developed yet.  The SEF issue isn’t that big of a deal because Google still crawls the pages and people can find what I post.  The searching has been a little weird.

I really like the included Joomla search module.  It’s works great but I just realized it doesn’t return results for any of my blog posts.  I had tried setting up Google search before, but it didn’t work too well.  I then tried to set it up again today and was still having problems with it finding my blog posts.  The weird thing is that if I do a normal Google search, go to the advanced options and search just my site, I can find blog posts.

I took the searchbox code Google provided and popped it into a module and created a static page for the search results.  I also popped the provided search results code onto the static page.  When I do a search with the module it goes to the static page, but doesn’t show any results, it just shows an empty search bar.  Then when I type my search into the search bar on the static page, no results for blog posts.

Am I doing something wrong here?  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Edit: Turns out sh404SEF was trying to re-write the URL for the landing page.  After I told it not to, everything worked fine.

Broken Interwebs?

Published
by
Chalupa
on January 20, 2009
in Internet
. 0 Comments

We’re trying to stream the inauguration stuff here today at work.  There’s some major lag going on.  All I can think of is the Southpark movie when the general was trying to pull up the map and got a blue screen of death.

Where’s Al Gore?!  Get him in here!  Why doesn’t the internet work?

Feedburner

Published
by
Chalupa
on November 17, 2008
in Advice, Google, RSS and Technology
. 4 Comments

If you have an active blog or website with RSS feeds enabled, Feedburner can be a very useful tool to see how many are subscribing to your feed and what’s being looked at and downloaded.  I recently upgraded my Feedburner account to the *new* Google version last month because I wanted to check out the new Adsense integration features.  This would allow me to put Google Adsense ads into my feeds.

After the migration was all said and done, I lost almost two years of feed stats on my podcast.  Major bummer.  So even though you can maybe, I highly stress maybe here, make a few bucks off of some ads, make sure you’re willing to lose all history of your statistics.

Excerpts from the Help Desk

Published
by
Chalupa
on September 29, 2008
in Internet and Nerdy/Geeky
. 1 Comment

I work in the IT profession.  I take phone calls and try to help people.  I create extensive documentation that makes me go crazy so we can try and avoid some of those phone calls.  Whenever I have to call up tech support, which I loathe, I always try to let them know that I’m “in the know” so they might skip some of the rigamorale.  Usually they have no idea what I’m talking about because they are script monkeys.

Recently our connection to Al Gore’s greatest gift to the Earth, the WWW, has been extremely slow.  Last night she gave out completely and much to my dismay, never came back on.  I tried all my tricks to no avail, so I gave Comcast a call after I got home from work.

Script Monkey: “So what’s your problem?”

Chalupa: “Well my internet quit working last night.  I’ve tried all the usual stuff.  I’ve restarted my computer, released and renewed my IP, reset my modem and router, etc, etc.  I’ve even tried plugging directly into the modem and I still can’t get anything.”

Script Monkey: “Ok, I think I can help you.”  <papers shuffling>
“What is the operating system of your modem?”

Chalupa: “My modem doesn’t have an operating system.  Do you want to know what brand it is?”

Script Monkey: “um, yeah”

Chalupa: “RCA”

<silence>

Script Monkey: “That doesn’t make any sense.  It’s supposed to be Vista or something.”

Chalupa: “If you want to know what OS I’m running, I’m on XP with SP3.”

Script Monkey: “Service Pack 3?  I’ve never heard of that.  Ok I need to you go to your computer and click on your Start button.”

Chalupa: “Ok, are you wanting me to check my IP?”

Script Monkey: “I need you to click on Run.  It should be at the bottom.”

Chalupa: “Do you want my IP address?”

Script Monkey: “Ok, now I need you to click on that and hit OK…..oh crap I gotta find the code you have to type.”

Chalupa: “Are you wanting me to check my IP or release it or something?”

Script Monkey: “Oh, here it is.  Type in ipconfig…..space….oh wait, no space.  Then hit OK”

Chalupa: “Are you wanting the IP address of my modem or my computer or my router?”

Script Monkey: “You don’t see an IP thingy?”

Chalupa: “There is an IP address, but this is the IP of my local machine and my router.  Since that’s all internal, it won’t really help you trying to find my modem”

It went on and on like this for a while.  And when she was telling me to hit “ok”, there is no ok.  Fortunately I was able to decipher what she really wanted and got her the needed info.  They kept insisting there was nothing wrong on there end, but after putting me on hold for several minutes, my connection magically started working again.  Luckily it only took me 2hrs to get things working.  Gotta love the Comcast.  How come whenever I call the techies I feel like I ended up helping them more than they helped me?

Preparations

Published
by
Chalupa
on April 17, 2008
in Life, Liz, Technology and Work
. 0 Comments

So Liz and I are going to be moving, date to be determined, this summer.  This may not sound like a huge deal, except I’ve been trying to get some things in order at work.  I’ll be finishing up my 9th year of working there.  First four years were as a student worker, 5th year was a full-time student-employee supervisor, and the last four years have been full-time hourly.  There are a lot of things I do that nobody else has ever touched.  Writing out instructions, tips, and what-have-you can be a daunting task.

This weekend we’re making a 1,000 mile trek so Liz can do a campus visit, we can look at some possible places to live, network with some people, and so I can go to what I’m interpreting as a pseudo-interview.  On top of all this, I’ve been trying to schedule a phone call interview for a fund raiser with some fellow Achievers who obviously aren’t millennials.  Even though I’m not from that generation, I sometimes forget that some people don’t have three email accounts open all day, a cell phone in their pocket, and several chat programs at their fingertips.

So with the finalization of a two year educational technology Lilly grant, a Second Life presentation, podcasting, blogging, and life…I now have a day to make sure I’m ready for a road trip.  I usually work well under pressure though so things should work out.